If you advertise in print magazines, newspapers, on TV or outdoors, you have to do one thing above all: stand out and differentiate yourself from the competition. As advertisements are always visual, agencies make use of a number of stylistic devices. In the following, we highlight a small selection of advertisements and analyze the advertising concepts and design tools behind them.

Creating an advertisement requires a high level of creativity and an exact, analyzing examination of the product to be advertised.

1) Humor and wit

Probably the most popular way to advertise a product as effectively as possible is to use funny metaphors and short stories. The man on the left in the picture supports his sleep with a darkening sleep mask, while his wife has to push the eye patch over her nose due to his bad breath. At the bottom right, at the end of our reading direction, the solution, i.e. the product to be advertised, is depicted in small but clear and striking colors.

2) The guiding gaze course

In many advertisements, a closer look reveals an arrangement system that automatically and completely unconsciously guides our eye to the target. In our example above of the Rittersport company, our eye is drawn to the company logo at the bottom right after it has looked closely at the entire advertising campaign in all areas.

The eye-track was also clearly defined in our first example and always serves to direct the viewer's eye to the essentials:

3) Child scheme

The use of the child schema often releases beautiful and positive emotions - or, as in this advertisement, triggers a certain feeling of care with an appeal to the reader. Almost everyone reacts to the child schema, whereby women in particular are supposed to respond to such advertising due to their protective instinct. The aim of the example ad above is to become a stem cell donor. The child schema method therefore depicts younger animals or children with big saucer eyes, a small snub nose, reddish cheeks or relatively large ears.

4) Transformations and manipulation

In this creative ad, the man's legs are supposed to represent a classic "tripod". The theme "perfect image stabilization" is to be directly associated with the Canon brand. The sky is closing with dark clouds, the man is standing on a mountain and can still shoot a perfect picture because of the stabilizer. In general, this ad is kept very simple at first glance, as the man's legs only catch the eye after a short time and then the attention is drawn to the Canon logo.

It is now common practice in the advertising industry to add a montage to images, as in our example above. Above all, however, image editing and beauty retouching in Photoshop is now also part of this. Professionals can quickly create transformations that have nothing to do with the original:

5) Guerrilla marketing

Guerrilla marketing effectively associates everyday objects with the product being promoted. In our example above, an optical illusion was created to represent the car of a major competitor, which is literally "left behind" by the transport company Fedex. In our other example, the well-known advertising slogan "Have a break" was also implemented literally: a bench with a candy bar look allows for a break in between. This is how you combine large, effective advertising space with practicality and effectiveness.

6) Colors and their effect

Nivea stands out with its unmistakable corporate identity (CI). On every poster and in every TV spot, the color blue appears in various shades and ensures unmistakable recognition. Consciously, we only notice the dark blue in the Nivea logo, but just look at the background or the clothes of the actors or the models: all advertisements have a uniform appearance and pick up the CI again and again. Thus, each color also has a different meaning: the color combination of blue and white always looks clean and fresh, in keeping with cosmetic products. We will take a closer look at the exact effect of individual colors in another blog section.

You can find more information about the right choice of colors in this article. And the choice of the right fonts for advertisements and designs should not be neglected. In this blog post you will find everything you need to know about fonts.

By Celine Reeh