Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising

“73 As for themes linked to the in-group, as we have seen, the move to Gab brought about a shift in focus away from Britishness (British nationalism theme) and toward in-groupness ( Britain First – group).”

“Research has suggested that people process visuals faster, easier, and more efficiently than written texts due to ease of information processing (Messaris 1997; Paivio 1979; Schill 2012).”

“The theory of visual persuasion provides scholars with some tools for identifying and classifying some of the visual techniques used by web designers for influencing viewer’s impressions (Messaris, 1997).”

“Therefore, puns encourage consumers to draw conclusions about the product and the marketing message that go beyond what is stated in the text (Messaris, 1997).”

“…space, and derives its eye-catching effect from the iconicity of the image, coupled with the attention-getting process modelled on real-world facial cues, which involve looking directly into the eyes of our interlocutor, an element of everyday interpersonal interaction (Messaris, 1997: 21).”

“Moreover, because visual images are subject to a wider latitude of interpretations than are text-based cues (Messaris, 1997) differences in interpretations across participants may have had an unexpected influence on the findings.”

“Visuals are a prominent feature of the media landscape (Messaris, 1997).”

“Messaris (1997) understands how visual images target inner feelings, but contends that these feelings are relatively stable and fixed.”

“…related to the signs is that those used in the “ Amazing from Afar ” conditions could have been more frequently viewed and attended to because their design was more attractive than the regulatory information signs and combined iconography with real-world artifacts (i.e., photos) (Messaris, 1997).”

“Previous advertising research has long explored the persuasive influence of product visuals on consumer outcomes (Messaris 1997; Miniard et al. 1991; Mitchell 1986; Ogilvy 1983).”

“Mass media, including advertisements, are multimodal (Day, 1999; Messaris, 1997), given that many modes, such as music or colour, contribute to the conveyance meaning in addition to written or spoken language.2 This study joins previous research on multimodal legitimation with its focus being on…”

“Information communicated through visuals was thought to evoke both affective and cognitive modes at a glance, presenting associations, comparisons, or correlations (Barry, 1997; Messaris, 1997).”

“From consumer psychology, the visual information has been recognized as an important factor that influences the consumer’s decision making and has an important power of persuasion [18].”

“They are treated as a resource, the iconic and indexical characteristics of which can add to the syntactic clarity of the verbal (Messaris 1997) and affect the perception and cognition of information Agrawala, Li, and Berthouzoz (2011).”

“Visual metaphors are similar to verbal metaphors yet visual metaphors can also be characterized as visual argumentation, in that it employs the syntactic structure of visual persuasion (Messaris, 1997).”

“In well-constructed images, the designer selects and organises elements so that the viewer can ‘make analogical connections with abstract elements’ and ‘elements in the real world’ (Messaris 1996, p. 54).”

“Theoretical foundations such as type of shape, age, sex, and type of color of images from the field of fine arts were considered before designing the images.(47) To be consistent throughout all the promotional messages and to avoid any confounding effects from excessive graphics, same age, sex, color, shape, and medic…”

“Messaris (1997) argues that visuals are crucial to gaining a better understanding of politics in the 21st century, as they prove to be more powerful than words alone.”

“This finding is consistent with studies of visual materials that highlight the inherent advantages of visuality in terms of stronger emotional engagement, attracting greater attention, and inducing stronger recall (Joffe, 2008; Messaris, 1997; Walter et al., 2017).”

“…photographic images, to record what is deemed to be unmediated and “true,” such that the meanings of these images reside primarily in what is denoted and literal than any deeper symbolic association (Barthes 1977, 32–51; also see Messaris 1997 and Price and Wells 2009 on the Peircean perspective).”

“Visual rhetoric [20] is typically used in advertisements to add persuasiveness, whereas procedural rhetoric [7] is offered in video games to persuade people to play the games.”

“Both verbal and visual metaphors stir emotion and garner attention ( Messaris, 1997 ), offer insight into how people see the world, and expose expectations.”

“Yet art and advertising have come a long way together from the 19th century, when artists were recruited by embryonic advertising agencies to draw sales posters (Bogart, 1995), to our time, when art plays an important role in promoting such products as Absolut Vodka (Messaris, 1997).”

“…I C L E K E Y W O R D S • action research • conflict resolution • ethnographic film • track two diplomacy • visual communication 326 It has been pointed out by Messaris (1997) and others that cross cultural communication suffers from mutable interpretations of iconic images which taken out of…”

“Visual communication theories suggest that identification with models increases ad engagement and, subsequently, susceptibility (Messaris, 1997).”

“The subjective perspective has been found to be particularly effective in this regard, as research on advertising has shown that subjective shots have a significant impact on audience interest in the scenes being portrayed (Messaris, 1997).”

“In his 1997 book “Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising” [56], Paul Messaris outlines iconicity, indexicality, and syntactic indeterminacy as the fundamental traits of images that distinguish them from other modalities and uniquely affect the ad campaign.”

“Messaris (1997) challenges the conventional ways of looking at visual advertising images by examining films and television commercials using different theories (semantic, syntactic and even iconic) with regard to persuasive communication.”

“Apparently both men and women are drawn to attractive images of models (Messaris 1997).”

“A wide array of studies have begun to address aspects of that general question, including Geiger and Reeves (1993), Lang, (1995, 2000), Lang, Geiger, Strickwerda, and Sumner (1993), Lang, Newhagen, and Reeves (1996), Messaris (1997), and Reeves et al. (1985).”

“While visuals have long played an important role in advertising (Messaris, 1997), the rise of online and mobile retail further demonstrates the proliferation of digital images in consumer society.”

“Images, on the other hand, are perceived in a more holistic way and elicit more emotional responses than textual claims (Messaris, 1997).”

“Scholarship in the broader fields of visual rhetoric and data visualization often integrates functionalist approaches (Kress & van Leeuen, 2006; Messaris, 1997; Tufte, 1997), with culturalideological ones (Brasseur, 2003; Kostelnick & Hassett, 2003, for example) to great effect.”

“They somehow dictate what to buy in order to stay ‘trendy’ (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 140; Messaris, 1997: 38–40).”

“Through various techniques, advertisers recontextualize objects by removing them from their lived context and placing them in ad frameworks, where their meanings are reshaped (Goldman 2005; Messaris 1997).”

“It can also involve voters photographing their bodies from their own point of view or, as Messaris (1997) describes it, the subjective camera (α = .86).”

“For many scholars, what defines this indexical mode of photographs is the idea that they are an aide-mémoire (for example, Hughes and Noble 2003; Keenan 1998; Messaris 1997).”

“Like text, visual elements can convey a major part of the advertising message (Messaris, 1997).”

“Visual images and testimonials can be highly persuasive and increase comprehension and relevance of medical information [16, 17].”

“Visual communication, therefore, explores the idea that a visual message with text has a greater power to inform or persuade a person (Messaris 1996), in our case the prospective voter.”

“This study argues that one of the key ways in which photographs work is through juxtapositions to suggest associations, contrasts and analogies (Blair, 2004; Messaris 1997).”

“Visuals enable an ability to allude without providing grounds or logical conjunctions and consequently to influence by suggestion, offering the potential to articulate messages that are not intended to be verbalized (McQuarrie & Phillips, 2005; Messaris, 1997; Rämö, 2011; Rossiter & Percy, 1983).”

“By targeting the message to a specific audience, viewers may see it as more relevant —an important consideration for attending to and thinking about a message [14,39].”

“As a number of visual scholars have explained, a single image is ambiguous and requires context in the form of language to be understood or rendered persuasive (Benovsky, 2011; Blair, 2012; Hawhee & Messaris, 2009; Messaris, 1997).”

“Grabe (1996, 2000) and Messaris (1997) studied the impact of the visual frame on individual processing of images in news stories and advertisements.”

“Es de los sentidos que más puede impactar la mente, pues facilita la persuasión y genera gran capacidad de recordación, (Costa, 2010), y puede evocar una respuesta emocional hacia un producto (Messaris, 1997).”

“Images are not mere reproductions of reality but persuasive tools that through symbols and composition construct arguments and guide emotions (Messaris 1997).”

“Consequently, various research communities, including communication studies and social psychology, have extensively studied visual persuasion (Messaris, 1996; Garber and Hyatt, 2003; Seo, 2020; Miller, 1998).”

“However, work in media studies and communication theory suggests images play a critical role in conveying meaning and are a powerful rhetoric tool [8, 30, 33].”

“…has received scholarly attention pertaining to a variety of findings such as identification of ideological dimensions (e.g. Goldman, 1992/2000; Messaris, 1996; Williamson, 1978/2002), stylistic and rhetorical properties (e.g. Lester, 2020; McQuarrie & Phillips, 2008) with a particularly…”

“, 2006; Saguy & Gruys, 2010; Zillman & Brosius, 2000) and affective reactions to the health messages (Buck et al., 2004; Chaudhuri & Buck, 1995; Joffe, 2008; Messaris, 1997; Niederdeppe et al., 2008; Zillman, 2006).”

“Such appropriation of symbols is made possible by what Messaris (1997) argues is an image’s ‘iconicity.’”

“Various cues for producing persuasive advertisement messages and images have been proposed; some examples can be found in [11, 12].”

“Visual images, according to Messaris (1997), are persuasive on the basis of being iconic (attracting attention and making emotional appeals), indexical (serving as proof), or symbolic (functioning as argumentative claims).”

“Visual elements do have a great protential to influence experts in decision processes [20] and thus, these consensus diagrams, when presented to the experts, will allow them to have a more profound and clear view about the consensus process and about which experts have similar or different opinions…”

“All in all, Hoechst favours photographs of people who will bene t from their work which is a common strategy in advertising (e.g. Goldman and Papson, 1996: Messaris, 1997).”

“Initial forays suggest that scrutinizing visual fonns of simulated "reality" tell us a great deal not only about the nature of media rhetoric, or the limits of veridical representation, but about the self-conscious perfonnance of cultural style in newspapers (Barnhurst, 1994; Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001), photojournalism…”

“Researching consumer’ attitude towards particular advertisement, several studies has claimed that images in advertisements help to convey the intended message to the audience (Kim, Choi, et al. , 2019; Messaris, 1997).”

“Images used in fright tourism advertising elicit a strong response from the viewer since ‘seeing an image is an embodiment of the physical attractions of the real world’ (Messaris, 1996, p. vi).”

“I thereby follow a strand of research that is concerned with visual metaphors (Messaris, 1997) and visual rhetoric (Foss, 2005).”

“Moreover, when it comes to memorability, one of the key measures of persuasive effect, studies found that compared to graphics and video, text messages are the most difficult to recall [30, 63, 49].”