Computer Vision News - December 2018

Advertisements are one way to convey a message, often a very simple one. For example, they want to associate that Tabasco sauce is hot or Red Bull gives you energy . They do it through these things called visual metaphors. It’s not just a technique in advertising. It’s also used in journalism. It’s also used in public service announcements. When I give a talk, the first slide I have is a visual metaphor. What’s nice about visual metaphors is, not only do they capture attention and convey a meaning, but they are a little bit of a puzzle because you usually see two objects blended together. So like a Red Bull can and a battery packet. You recognize both individually, but your brain is like: “ Huh, something is wrong there ”. It takes you half a second to figure out what the message is. That is valuable for people remembering and recalling this information. You don’t need to think about it twice. Does it really have to be wrong? It’s something that your brain can’t automatically classify. If you see just a Tabasco bottle, you don’t notice it. Because you've seen it before, there's nothing interesting or challenging about it. Metaphors are useful across language and vision in getting your product picked. It helps you explain something new in terms of something else that you already know. There is a cultural dependency here. The overall rule is you need to use symbols that your audience will understand. You have a very strong sentence that says: “ When you are interpreting symbols, first associations are better than logic .” Can you explain that? One of these visual metaphors is trying to convey that Tabasco is hot. That’s a message that most people have already heard so you have some background knowledge of that information. If I were trying to tell you that Tabasco is for curing cancer, that would be very weird because you never heard that before, and it would probably need more information than a Tabasco bottle put in a fire extinguisher. Instead of the fire extinguisher cylinder, they put Tabasco. Because it has the handle, the strap, the little hose, and the gauge to tell you how much pressure it has, all those things identify it as a fire extinguisher. Pauline Luc 33 Computer Vision News Lydi Chilton Women in Science “Most symbols are highly ambiguous. They need a little bit of context and a little bit of background knowledge to ground them at all.”