Step 2. Vocabulary Practice: Contemporary Visual Advertising

Read the text and match the words with their definitions.

The objectives of advertising are to promote a product and strengthen the company’s image as well as to point out or create a need for services or products. This may be achieved by using various advertising methods, for example: print advertising (newspapers, magazines, flyers, booklets, etc), outdoor (or out-of home) advertising, broadcast advertising (television and radio), product placement (goods and services promoted within the context of a film), online and mobile advertising.

Research from 2014 shows that the television commercial is the most powerful mass-market format of advertisement. Online marketing, however, is becoming more and more effective, especially display advertising (ads located on websites). Here the message is presented visually, by using text, logos, images, flash, video and audio. One of relatively new advertising formats are overlay video ads. They appear in the form of small, semi-transparent banners. Viewers can click on them and watch the content. Another popular type of display advertising are pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll video units. They appear before, during and/or after a video stream* on the Internet.

Online visual advertising seems to be very powerful. Researchers have discovered that twice as many readers are drawn by an ad containing a picture than by a headline itself. Images convey various associations which consumers may have with the product. Visual story telling tends to keep the consumer interested and is also engaging.

*a live flow of digital information. The content of the video is placed on the server, so the user does not have to download it.