Creating a Proxy Advertisement for Cognitive Response Evaluation in Visual Metaphor Studies Under Advertisement Research

Established business houses, start-ups, government agencies, etc., in the modern commercial world rely heavily upon their advertisement content for their brand imaging and subsequent commercial success. Advertisement content helps them to connect with their potential customers. A good advertisement must convey the intended message to the user and be exciting, engaging, and immersive. Effective use of visual metaphors in advertisement creation plays a vital role in this direction. Well-thought and rigorously imbibed visual metaphors in an advertisement enhance its usability and comprehensibility. Visual Metaphor Studies (VMS) are employed to identify and assess the visual metaphors used and their associated cognitive human response that depicts the engaging power of the advertisement under observance. While conducting VMS, there lie several challenges with respect to having access to choose proper advertisement for further study purposes, viz. Copyright issues, paucity of adequate advertisement material, etc. As such, there lies a dire need to design and develop one’s own advertisement based on various visual metaphors in several unique combinations. Such proxy/mock advertisements can help the researcher to have adequate cognitive human responses from the intended user population to the stimulus used within those. Such responses help the researcher assess the advertisement’s usability and comprehensibility. In this paper, the researchers have demonstrated ‘how to design and create a mock advertisement for cognitive response evaluation for prospective VMS.’ This paper thus can act as a ready reckoner for visual creators, graphic designers, and researchers to design mock advertisements and predict their usability by conducting VMS.