Metaphors In Advertising

In the history of metaphor study, many principles and theories are put forward. One of them is the Metaphorical Thought theory by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. They proposed that "metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980. p3). And in 2002, in the book The Way We Think Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner stated the principle underlying our thinking, that is, the Conceptual Integration theory which can show the imaginative mental operations in human mind while creating and understanding metaphor.Advertisements are a pervasive kind of communication of messages with practical and clear communication aims in today's society. In the common catching and effective advertisements, metaphorical expressions are applied by the ad creators as a strategy to achieve the effective conveyance of the advertised messages or concepts to the target audience.Based on some academic knowledge of advertising and the above two principles, this paper shows that metaphors in advertising are a most appropriate example of human metaphorical thinking. And the expressions of metaphor, verbal and verbo-pictorial in this paper, show the creative ideas of the ad creators and help the audience build up conceptual integration networks in their mind while understanding the metaphors.