Getting a Line on Print Ads: Pleasure and Arousal Reactions Reveal an Implicit Advertising Mechanism

This paper explores the question of how ad creativity can be characterized from an emotional point of view. We first identify a tight linear relation between pleasure and arousal reactions as a structural characteristic of emotional reactions to print advertising. We demonstrate the reliability and robustness of this linear relation for varied samples of print ads in two studies. Relying on the bioinformational theory of emotion, we illustrate that this linear relation reflects activation of the appetitive motivational system. Further investigation of an ad's position on the line revealed that the degree of deviation from this line in both directions is positively related to creative content. Creative content was determined objectively by means of content analysis detecting extraordinary message features and subjectively by means of perceived extraordinariness measures.