Ad Lingua

I’ve been thinking about the different types of wordplay & linguistic flourishes used in ad copy. Here’s a thread of some I like & what I think is happening in each (I may get some wrong — apologies in advance).

A classic option is re-working traditional phrases. There are quite a few of these, like this one for Ford, which I think was written by Alan Parker when he was at CDP:

Or this one for Fiat:

I hadn’t seen this one for IBM:

And I definitely hadn’t seen this one for Brylcreem, which re-purposed Fred Flinstone’s catchphrase:

But I had seen this one for VW, which I think is still worth sharing again:

This is another classic, from Porsche:

And you can always rely on the Economist:

Another type of wordplay is using contradictions, like this one from Fiat (again):

On a similar tip, opposites, like this one from Zanussi (from whom more later):

Disappointingly, rhyme seems to have gone out of fashion, along with the jingle, but I bet everyone remembers this classic from Mars:

Thomas Cook are having a few problems, but I still love this rhyming line. It also makes use of a metonym — a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated.

I believe words that are nouns & verbs are called gerunds, which I think is what’s happening in these amazingly powerful ads from Crisis Relief. In rhetoric, I believe this device is also called antimeria:

Synonyms are different words that have the same or similar meanings (I think). Like this one, written by Charles Saatchi (which may also have some gerunding going on):

Homonyms are (& I quote) “each of two or more words having the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings & origins), which I what I think Zanussi (them again) used here:

And a classic to finish, which I think is an example of consonance — the recurrence of similar-sounding consonants: