Introduction

Summary

Metaphor, where one entity is talked about in terms of another unrelated entity, is a powerful and widely used device in advertising. For example, cars are talked about as if they were animals. Household devices are presented as if they were people, and washing powders are talked about as if they were superheroes. Although metaphor sometimes works on its own in advertising, it is more common for it to operate in combination with other tropes, such as metonymy, irony, and hyperbole. Moreover, it rarely appears solely in a linguistic form but often manifests in other, non-linguistic forms of expression. This is particularly pertinent in advertisements that involve new media, such as internet fora, viral advertising campaigns, and social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Metaphor and other forms of figurative communication are inherently flexible, which makes them ideal for use in diverse cultural settings, as they can mean different things to different people. At the same time this carries an element of risk, as they are often open to misinterpretation.