Levels of implicitness in magazine advertisements

Abstract

Some advertisements attract our attention because we do not immediately see what they are about. They incite us to reflect upon the delivered message. Several studies have shown that this kind of implicit messages can have a considerable impact on readers/viewers: elaboration, retention and appreciation appear to increase (. But what if the complexity of the advertisement exceeds the reader/viewer's capacity of resolution? What are the consequences for the appreciation of the ad? This paper reports an experiment to test the effect of 3 levels of implicitness on the appreciation of advertisements. 88 participants rated their appreciation and experienced complexity of 12 advertisements. The results showed that the level of implicitness has a significant impact on the ad's appreciation. Furthermore, it appeared that appreciation followed an inverted U-curve: advertisements that were considered most difficult to understand were less appreciated than relatively less complex advertisements.

Multimodality and Genre

“…1 This is not an argument that all documents need to be immediately transparent to their readers: as Lemke (2002, p300) notes, there are cases where texts, for aesthetic, persuasive or attention-getting reasons, quite deliberately leave work for the interpreter to do-for example, in advertisements (cf. Van Mulken, Van Enschot and Hoeken 2005). The issue here is making sure that the effect is only produced deliberately and when intended rather than, as with the present gas bill, as an accident.…”

Talk about it: The effects of cryptic HIV/AIDS billboards

“…From Van Enschot's experiments, it may be concluded that these types of advertisements are appreciated more than others, provided that they ful l three conditions: the text and/or picture has to deviate in an artful manner from the readers' expectations; the readers have to think that they were able to successfully interpret the message; and the advertisement has to be considered as neither very easy nor very dif cult to understand. Van Enschot refers to this third phenomenon as an inverted U-curve (see also Van Enschot, Hoeken & Van Mulken 2008;Van Mulken, Van Enschot & Hoeken 2005).…”

Using Message Form to Stimulate Conversations: The Case of Tropes

“…Being able to come up with a meaningful interpretation may provide the audience with the type of selfcongratulatory thoughts hypothesized by Tanaka (1992Tanaka ( , 1994, which may result in a positive evaluation of the message. Several studies have indeed shown that the extent to which people appreciate tropes depends on whether they are capable of providing a meaningful interpretation of this deviation (Ketelaar, Van Gisbergen, & Bosman, 2004;Lee & Mason, 1999;McQuarrie & Mick, 1999;Phillips, 2000;Van Mulken, Van Enschot, & Hoeken, 2005a, 2005bVan Enschot et al, 2008). We use the label ''meaningful interpretation'' instead of ''intended interpretation'' because people appreciate tropes more if they are satisfied with their interpretation even if this interpretation deviates from the one intended by the message designer (Van Mulken et al, 2005a, 2005b.…”