“Crafty Advertisers”: Literary versus Literal Deceptiveness

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to use literary theory to extend prior categorizations of message claims that are likely to result in deception by implication from the level of the individual claim to that of the advertisement's overall meaning. The paper will first summarize three literary forms that advertising has adapted—metonymy, irony, and absurdity—and discuss each in terms of how form and content interact to yield the whole verbal meaning of a text. These forms can be used to structure an ad so that the totality misleads the consumer by perverting meaning in three different ways. Metonymy can mislead by adding multiple meanings; irony, by hiding doubled meanings; and absurdism, by conveying subjectively ambiguous meanings. Advertising examples will be presented in the discussion. The paper will conclude with research suggestions for gaining greater understanding of how artistic creativity can be balanced with the public policy need to protect the consumer from deception by innuendo.