ABSTRACT
A growing trend in print advertising involves violating expectations to draw consumer attention to products that may otherwise hold little interest. The purposes of this chapter are first, to better understand how visual imagery functions in relation to expectations-in doing so we merge concepts from message incongruity and visual rhetoric literature-and second, to review schema-based sources of expectations commonly used in print advertising. We review ad, product, brand, cultural, reality-deviating, and media-vehicle-based sources of schemas. We argue that a visual can both set and violate schema expectations and may violate multiple schemas in an ad execution.
