Journal of Advertising

Beyond What Meets the Eyes: The Power of Visuals in Advertising Research

Manuscripts are currently being solicited for a special issue of the Journal of Advertising (JA) dedicated to Beyond What Meets the Eyes: The Power of Visuals in Advertising Research.

Background

Communication today is overwhelmingly visual. The proliferation of visual media is not simply changing how individuals communicate and consume information; it is also reshaping the work of advertising researchers. Visuals increasingly enter the research process in at least three distinct ways: as data to be studied, as tools through which researchers analyze and make sense of phenomena, and as outputs through which researchers represent and communicate knowledge. Together, these roles call for a broader understanding of visuality in advertising research and of the methodological competencies required to engage with it. This is the impetus for this Special Issue of the Journal of Advertising.

Visuals as Data: Advertising research has long treated visual material as an important source of data, examining such forms as television commercials, magazine advertisements, advertising imagery, animation, and other forms of visual representation (Callcott and Lee 1994; Englis, Solomon, and Olofsson 1993; Englis, Solomon, and Ashmore 1994). Indeed, research documenting changes in magazine advertising over time suggests an increasing reliance on pictorial rather than verbal communication, such that consumers increasingly encounter advertisements as images to be viewed rather than texts to be read (McQuarrie and Phillips 2008). The contemporary visual landscape has expanded still further with Instagram posts, stories, and reels; TikTok and YouTube videos; product placements in video games; memes; GIFs; emojis; and numerous other forms of visual expression created not only by advertisers but also by consumers, influencers, platforms, and other market actors.

As images and visuality assume an unprecedented role in everyday life, the ability to systematically examine visual content becomes increasingly important for advertising researchers. Existing advertising research illustrates the theoretical richness of visual material, demonstrating how meaning can reside in such diverse visual features as pictorial metaphors (McQuarrie and Phillips 2005; Phillips 1997; van Mulken, van Hooft, and Nederstigt 2014), nature imagery (Hartmann, Apaolaza, and Eisend 2016), nonconformity imagery (Youn, Park, and Eom 2019), and even human silhouettes (Trinh 2024). More broadly, advertising scholars have increasingly recognized advertisements as aesthetic objects whose visual properties merit theoretical attention (Dagalp and Södergren 2024).

Yet studying visuals requires more than analyzing what is contained within an image. Images are produced, circulated, encountered, interpreted, appropriated, and transformed within particular social and cultural contexts. The meanings consumers derive from complex advertising images, for example, depend on cultural, advertising, and product knowledge (Phillips 1997), while visual representations of beauty and lifestyle can encode broader cultural meanings and social identities (Englis, Solomon, and Ashmore 1994; Englis and Solomon 1995). Researchers must therefore attend to the conditions under which images are created and consumed and to the broader visual cultures that shape what can be seen, how it is seen, and what it comes to mean.

Understanding visual material also requires attention to its production. Visuals do not simply exist as finished objects awaiting analysis; they emerge through creative practices, technologies, professional conventions, organizational constraints, and interactions among market actors. Research examining how advertising art directors construct visual brand identity, for example, demonstrates how visual elements emerge through processes of creative interpretation, selection, and negotiation (Phillips, McQuarrie, and Griffin 2014). Visual data thus encompass not only the image itself but also the cultural, technological, spatial, social, and production contexts through which that image comes into existence and acquires meaning.

Visuals as Tools for Analysis: Visuals also matter as tools through which researchers analyze and understand phenomena. Visualization can make visible relationships, structures, patterns, and processes that are not themselves inherently tangible or readily accessible through textual or numerical representations alone.

Advertising research already demonstrates how visual technologies can expand what researchers are able to observe and measure. Earlier research examined visual attention through direct observation, while subsequent work increasingly adopted eye-tracking technologies to capture where and how consumers direct their attention within advertising environments. More recent developments combine mobile eye tracking with machine-learning techniques capable of automatically detecting objects within consumers’ visual fields. These developments illustrate a broader progression in visual research from observing whether consumers look at advertising, to measuring where they look, to computationally analyzing what they encounter as they look.

Graphs, maps, diagrams, network representations, timelines, spatial visualizations, and other visual artifacts can similarly transform abstract phenomena—such as statistical relationships, geographic coordinates, social connections, temporal processes, or conceptual relationships—into forms that researchers can apprehend and interrogate. In this sense, visualization is not merely a means of illustrating an analysis that has already taken place. It can itself become part of the analytic process, enabling researchers to recognize patterns, identify relationships, generate interpretations, and develop theory. Visualizing data can therefore constitute a mode of inquiry, rather than simply a technique for displaying its results.

Visuals as Research Outputs: Finally, visuals are increasingly important as outputs through which researchers represent and communicate knowledge. Academic knowledge need not be conveyed exclusively through written text. Figures, conceptual diagrams, maps, data visualizations, photographs, and other visual artifacts can communicate findings and theoretical ideas in ways that complement—and sometimes accomplish things that cannot easily be achieved through—verbal exposition alone.

This proposition is particularly intriguing considering what advertising research already knows about visual communication. Pictures and words can produce different persuasive and interpretive processes (McQuarrie and Phillips 2005; Stafford 1996); verbal information can alter how consumers interpret images (Phillips 2000); and complex images invite viewers to actively construct meaning (Phillips 1997). Yet advertising scholarship has devoted considerably less attention to whether these same principles apply to our own scholarly communication. If visual representation affects how consumers comprehend, interpret, and remember advertising ideas, visual representation can similarly shape how researchers comprehend, develop, and disseminate theoretical ideas.

A compelling conceptual figure, for example, can make a theoretical argument more readily understandable by revealing relationships among constructs, processes, and mechanisms that may be difficult to apprehend from text alone (Rasolofoarison and Russell 2024). Visual representations may also increase the accessibility, memorability, and portability of research ideas, potentially facilitating their communication and dissemination both within academia and beyond it. Visuals therefore do not merely represent academic knowledge; they may influence how that knowledge is understood, developed, communicated, and circulated.

Visuals Across the Advertising Research Process: Taken together, these roles suggest that the contemporary visual turn is reshaping multiple stages of the academic process in advertising research (see Figure, “Visuals in the Research Process”). Visuals can constitute what we study, how we study it, and how we communicate what we learn. They operate as research inputs, as instruments of inquiry and interpretation, and as vehicles for research outputs, while the production and interpretation of these visuals remain embedded within broader visual cultures.

This transformation builds upon a substantial tradition of visual inquiry in advertising research, spanning research on imagery and representation (Englis, Solomon, and Olofsson 1993; Englis, Solomon, and Ashmore 1994), visual and pictorial rhetoric (McQuarrie and Phillips 2005; Phillips 1997), the historical evolution of advertising's visual style (McQuarrie and Phillips 2008; Phillips and McQuarrie 2002), aesthetics (Dagalp and Södergren 2024), and increasingly sophisticated technologies for capturing and analyzing visual attention. Advertising research to date shows that visuality is not a peripheral concern for advertising scholarship but an increasingly central feature of the phenomena we seek to understand.

Yet despite this growing momentum, formal methodological training and practical guidance for researchers seeking to incorporate visual approaches into advertising research remain relatively scarce. Existing research has predominantly focused on visuals as advertising objects to be interpreted or stimuli whose effects are measured, devoting considerably less attention to visuals as part of researchers’ own knowledge-production practices. Advertising scholarship has become increasingly sophisticated in understanding how advertisers communicate visually, while paying comparatively less attention to how advertising scholars themselves observe, analyze, theorize, and communicate visually.

This Special Issue hopes to serve as a more systematic framework for understanding where, how, and why visuals enter the advertising research process, while providing researchers with guidance for selecting and applying visual approaches appropriate to different research objectives.

Submissions to this issue should address one or more of the following objectives:

• examine the extent to which visual methods can provide insights into advertising research, which are not readily available through other methods;
• explore how theoretical and methodological insights from other disciplines such as visual sociology, art history, graphic design, film studies, photography, computer science, semiotics, media studies, communication studies, etc. could usefully contribute to advertising research and;
• provide through empirical illustrations an introduction to specific visual methodologies and practical guidelines for advertising researchers who are not familiar with visual methodologies

 

POTENTIAL TOPICS

We welcome submissions using diverse theoretical, conceptual, and methodological perspectives, and empirical approaches. We encourage prospective authors to review recently published papers in the Journal of Advertising to understand the Journal’s rigor and style.

Topics may include emerging, underexplored, or theoretically generative questions related to visuality in advertising, including–but not limited to–the following areas:

• Visual theory

• • Graphic design principles

• • Semiotics

• • Eye movement research

• • Vision and perception

• • Visual attention

• • Visual narrativity

• Visual material/visual data

• • Classic advertising stimuli: magazine ads, posters, OOH ads, packaging, product placement, promotions

• • Social media stimuli: ads, posts, reels, videos on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch

• • Photographs, videos, TV series, Films, surveillance cameras, drawings, online reviews, web pages, video games

• • Warning labels, logos

• Visual methods

• • Creating visual stimuli for experimental designs

• • Visual content analysis

• • Network analysis

• • Visualizing psychophysiology: eye-tracking, fMRI, ECG

• • Data visualization

• • Computational advertising research

• Revisiting classic advertising visual topics with new theoretical lenses

• • Visual representations

• • Gender/social norms

• • Visual metaphors

• Critical perspective

• • Societal consequences of the “effectiveness” of visual messages

• • Transformative Advertising Research framework

• • Reproduction of beauty norms

Conclusion: We hope our Special Issue opens up a broader conversation about how advertising and consumer researchers can make more rigorous, more reflective, and more critical use of visuals; and to map the many ways images can be mobilized.

(contact Guest Editors for list of references)