Abstract:

Advertising comes at the head of communication activities that brands have used to communicate with their consumers from past to present. The fact that advertising is seen as an indispensable element by brands can cause individuals to be consciously or unconsciously exposed to numerous messages in their daily life. In this regard, how consumers understand and interpret these messages can lead from the attitude towards the advertisement to the act of purchasing. At this point, advertising literacy has been playing an important role as a part of media literacy. The aim of this study is to determine the advertising literacy dimensions of consumers and to measure how their attitudes towards rational and emotional advertising change in terms of advertising literacy dimensions. For this purpose, the survey technique designed utilizing Google Forms has been applied to 271 people, on the scale of online networks with the convenience-sampling method. According to the results of the research, which was developed based on Malmelin's (2010) four-dimensional advertising literacy model, four basic advertising literacy factors were revealed: informational, rhetorical, visual/aesthetic and promotional. It has been observed that the informational and visual/aesthetic dimensions have a significant and positive effect on the attitude towards rational and emotional ads.

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