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Many studies have been conducted on the persuasive effectiveness of text and pictures in print advertising. Some researchers supported copy as a central element in making an advertisement effective (Chang, 2006; Phillips, 2000; Stafford, 1996). However, the majority of them highlighted the superiority of the pictorial elements compared to the verbal ones (Childers and Houston, 1984; Mitchell, 1986; Obermiller and Sawyer, 2011; Wedel and Pieters, 2000), and it seems that we are becoming a visual society in which "we're losing our patience with words" (Pierson, 2013).
Yet very few studies were devoted to the effects of recipients' way of processing pictorial advertising stimuli on attitudes. One reason could be that for a long time, pictorial stimuli have generally only been considered to be peripheral cues in research on print ads' persuasive effectiveness. Nevertheless, previous research demonstrated that some pictorial stimuli may act as strong arguments and be more or less effective depending on the recipients' motivation for processing an ad (Miniard et al. , 1991). Typically, when people are motivated and able to think about the content of the message, elaboration is high, whereas when people are not motivated and/or have low capacity to think about message content, elaboration is low (Petty et al. , 1987). In the present research, we were interested in how the way pictorial stimuli are processed may be affected by recipients' low capacity for elaboration, typically when individuals are cognitively charged. In real-life situations, consumers have to deal with multifactorial environmental stimuli, which reduce the cognitive resources they can, or want to, allocate when exposed to an ad. It can be particularly true in urban settings where stress is frequently experienced (Moser, 1988) and because people are frequently exposed to visual and auditory overload (Mousavi et al. , 1995). In situations of cognitive overload, individuals' attention is drawn to stimuli other than those in the ad, but pictures are more easily processed than words and consequently could be less impacted by a diminished capacity for elaboration (Holbrook and Moore, 1981).
An additional issue of interest in the present research was the extent to which pictorial stimuli act as distractors when recipients are processing ads' verbal claims. Because of their highly arousing and attention-capturing properties, pictures may negatively impact verbal claim...