THE RELEVANCE CONTINUUM IN COMMERCIAL ADVERTISING
THE RELEVANCE CONTINUUM IN COMMERCIAL ADVERTISING

Summary/Abstract: Relevance flouting represents a major development in commercial advertising where the slight difference that exists between commodities entitle advertisers to superimpose non-relevant concepts with which the consumer will strive to work out a however far-fetched connection. Non-relevant verbal or visual elements overcome audience distrust, increase claim strength, enhance tangibility through sexual innuendo, and compensate for the lack of “new feature” information in a continuum, ranging from strong and overtly communicated, through weak and covert implicatures inherent in metaphoric expression, figurative and loose language and puns, to extreme frustrated relevance and indirectness. This hypothesis will be tested on ads for commercial products within the framework of Relevance Theory.

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