Emotional Appeals and Information Cues in Belgian Magazine Advertisements

An extensive analysis of the content of advertising stimuli over the last twenty years has been carried out on a representative sample of Belgian magazine advertisements, using an extensive analytical framework of different information cues and types of emotional appeals. The evolution of advertisement content over time and across product categories is studied, and a measure of ‘degree of overall similarity of strategy’ (DOSS) is proposed and calculated in the Belgian context. The relevance of this measure for advertising effectiveness is highlighted and suggestions for further research are proposed.