Verbal Rhetoric versus Message Repetition Under Heavy Processing Load and Incidental Exposure to Advertising

Overloaded and disinterested consumers have become skillful at screening out ads. In response, advertisers employ and combine various strategies, with two major ones being (a) rhetorical figures (e.g., rhyme, puns) and (b) message repetition. Though each has received substantial research attention and is crucial to advertising theory, they have not been examined simultaneously. We conducted a multi-magazine experiment that imposed a heavy processing load and incidental exposure to ads. Target ads had headlines varying in rhetorical structure (figurative or not, and scheme or trope) and were repeated one, two, four, or six times. We found that alterations to rhetorical structure had a systematically greater impact on memory, cognitive responses, and ad evaluations than variations in message repetition. Also, consistent with a resource-matching perspective, but contrary to several prior studies, rhetorical schemes that are characterized by internal redundancy (e.g., rhyme), as compared to rhetorical tropes that are more open-ended (e.g., puns), were more effective at intensifying consumers’ selective processing of target ads.