ABSTRACT
It should not surprise readers of this volume that over the past 100 years, the picture has come to occupy a larger and larger portion of the typical American magazine advertisement. At the same time, the number of words, and the proportion of the ad devoted to text, has decreased. Pollay (1985), who was among the first to document this trend, also showed that the trend toward pictures and away from verbal text extends back throughout the 20th century. Pracejus, Olsen, and O’Guinn (2006), using a more fine-grained sampling strategy, confirm the trend and showed that it continued after the publication of Pollay (1985). McQuarrie and Phillips (2006) suggest that the trend toward picture-dominant ads may actually have accelerated after the mid-1990s. In summary, as of 2006, it is not uncommon to encounter a consumer magazine ad that contains a dozen or fewer words, while featuring a picture that fills the entire space of the ad, and it is now quite rare to find such an ad having more than a hundred words, and only a small picture.
