Advertising: still a mystery.

A major project to draw together an overview of how advertising (particularly print advertising) works highlights that (except for a few succinct, general rules) we really know very little about how this huge discipline works. Most startling is that, while there are many thousands of papers on different aspects of how advertising works, many present views or opinions that have not been confirmed by other studies. Those basic rules that have been confirmed are unfortunately very few indeed.

For print ads these basic rules include: Effective ads are large and coloured, but where they are placed in a publication is less important. Visual cues are often more effective than …