Advertising Style: Language Techniques That Make Ads Memorable

Style in advertising is short, brief, repetitive and easy to understand and remember. It is innovative: the language is heterogeneous, offers maximum freedom and breaks with the norm. It uses a variety of registers, languages, and rhetorical resources (metaphor, personification) and varied discourses (literary, scientific, etc.). It makes creative use of typography and frequently includes neologisms.

Type

The type of text may be argumentative, but also descriptive, narrative or based on expressive resources.

Structure

The structure is very open: it is not always necessary to show an image, and brands like eBay do not always appear. It usually has three parts:

• Attention: attractive graphic elements.
• Body text: information and argument.
• Closing sentence: insists on the main idea to reinforce memorization.

Three Texts

• Brand name: the name that identifies the product. It is the result of a creative process, and it is expected to become a great reference. It informs whether the text and the image will be connected with the product, and it will carry connotations that can help consolidate the brand.
• Tagline: a phrase that is quick to read, attractive (witty, original, poetic) and clear, easy to remember at the moment of purchase. It often shows the brand name or a closing phrase. It frequently uses metaphors or other rhetorical figures, puns, and transformations of expressions and proverbs.
• Body text: it may disappear entirely. Depending on the type of advertisement, it can be informative or persuasive. It offers maximum information in a glance, with a clear and simple style.

Phonic Level

It highlights the message and emphasizes the use of few foreign phonemes or graphemes, or unusual combinations of phonemes. It uses rhyme and phonic rhetorical resources such as onomatopoeia, alliteration and paronomasia.

Morphosyntactic Level

It tends toward concision and omits weighty elements:

• Ellipsis of the verb, words, morphemes, articles, nexus, etc.
• Comparative adjectives showing superiority ("better than") and different types of superlatives.
• Imperatives abound, along with questions and exclamations, with predominantly phatic and conative functions.
• Second person (informal "you") creates a dialogue that involves the receiver. The third person implies a formal and distant treatment.
• Short sentences: the phrases are sometimes nominal, with appositions (explanation or specificity), and can be very long or consist of infinitive clauses.
• Among compound sentences, coordinate and juxtaposed clauses predominate, and among subordinate clauses: conditional, consecutive and comparative clauses.

Lexical-Semantic Level

It highlights innovation and the value of connotative words.

• Connotative lexicon: an abundance of words associated with positive connotations that promote advertising (intelligence, elegance, ecology, etc.). Many adjectives are used. Brands also carry connotations (Chanel: luxury). The use of other languages gives an expressive value (toilet water).
• Neologisms of all kinds, presented as technicisms to suggest the prestige of the product. Vulgarisms or colloquialisms may also appear.

Rhetorical Resources

It seeks to surprise, to be witty, provocative and beautiful, to attract attention, and to favor remembering the message through repetition. It also relies heavily on tropes (metaphor, comparison, metonymy, synesthesia) and figures that affect meaning, such as pun, wordplay, double meaning, personification, contrast, paradox and hyperbole.

Connectors and Cohesion

Features include the relationship between semantics and the parts of the text, invariant words, and syntactic breaks that give the text a clear structure from start to finish.

1. Structurers: organize the information, the text, and the message from beginning to end. Initiators, closers (summaries), digressions, and spatial and temporal markers.
2. Connectors: argumentative (ideas and concepts), additive (and), counter-argumentative (but), and consecutive (therefore).
3. Reformulators: explanatory (that is), corrective (better said), distancing, and recapitulative (in short).
4. Operators: add, specify information. They reinforce the argument (indeed), specify (for example), and express a point of view.
5. Conversational markers: signal the speaker's steps of certainty and dialogue, such as listen, look, see, clearly, then, of course.