A survey on the functionality of metrical-rhyming structures in Italian advertising

The history of television offers literary criticism countless instances of texts structured according to the rules of accented metrics. These ‘norms’, on which the forms of poetic language were once arranged, are still used today in advertising communication. Italian advertising, from Carosello (1957) to the present day, is the most appropriate example: in it, verses, rhymes and rhetorical figures are the elements most commonly borrowed from poetic tradition. To understand the reasons for this phenomenon, I have investigated the reception of advertising messages, comparing the effects aroused by listening to two categories of stimuli (spot1 = structured messages in verse and rhyme; spot2 = structured messages without verse and rhyme) present in a single experimental design. The results of this research suggest that advertising texts belonging to the first category are more easily remembered and have a higher approval rating, as compared to commercials that use common language.