Visuals in Advertising

I’ve spoken previously about the effects of humor in advertising, and now I’m going to discuss another aspect of advertising that I find very interesting: Visuals.

The reason I find visuals so interesting is probably because as a former architecture student, I found design to be very interesting. The idea that you can say something, without saying anything is very intriguing to me. In architecture, this can mean symbolizing something by the way a building is shaped, how the façade looks, or how the interior flows from one room to another. In the same way, visuals in advertising have the potential to say as much or more than what the actual words might say.

One obvious use of visuals can be clearly seen in many of Apple’s advertisements. Take this one for example:

In this ad, there are only three words that are clearly displayed for a while on the screen and are read aloud. However, the visual aspect of showing the phone doing so many useful things is what is used to give information to the viewer. The visuals serve as the primary information givers in the ad.

Visuals can also serve as an attention getter for an ad, like this one:

The gun with cigarettes in the chambers obviously doesn’t mean that the gun is going to literally shoot cigarettes in order to kill, but it does give a fairly shocking visual representation of the danger of smoking while capturing the reader’s attention. The picture is likely to grab the attention of a reader and hopefully cause them to take another look, or slow down and figure out what the ad is all about. If the advertiser can stand out and make the audience look at the ad for a little bit longer than other competing ads, then the advertiser has succeeded in his or her task.

Another purpose of visuals in advertising is portrayed well in many political advertisements.

Warning: the following ad contains pretty graphic visuals, so if you get queasy easily or do no want to see disturbing images regarding abortion, do not watch.

In case you skipped the ad, basically it was a pro-life political ad asking voters to vote for a specific candidate in order to ban abortion. The ad contained the voice of the candidate speaking about abortion while images of fetuses and aborted babies were shown on the screen.

Unlike the other ads, the visual aspect of this ad was not necessarily used to convey information about the issue to the viewer. Nor was it primarily (I believe) used to grab the viewers attention, although it certainly did so. The images were used in order to provoke a specific emotion towards the issue of abortion. Many times, images and visual aspects in ads are used to provoke specific emotions or thoughts about a product, company, or issue without explicitly stating it. Advertisers might use images of sunny days and happy people to make the audience feel positively so that when the product or brand is then shown, the positive emotions are then transferred to them.

Visuals do many more things in advertising, but these are three large ways in which visuals are used as tools in the art of persuasive advertising. What other ways might visuals/images be used in advertising? Is one use more effective than the others? Are visuals more important than the text of an ad? Let me know in the comments!