Abstract

In today’s digital age, where attention spans are limited, and competition for audience engagement is fierce, creating captivating and inspiring advertisements is essential to stand out amid a sea of sales-driven alternatives. Visual metaphor in this context of visual communication emerges as an important tool. Visual metaphors in advertisements use graphical representations to connect viewers with the concepts, effectively capturing their attention. Being an essential element in the advertisement, it is crucial to assess the research trends in this domain. This study uses the Scopus database to map and analyze the current state of scientific research on visual metaphors in advertising. The study examines co-citation patterns and identifies leading authors, publications, and citations on the topic. The study also presents affinity mapping done of the keywords to help future scholars explore this area. The findings suggest a growing interest in the field over the past three decades. However, compared to other areas of visual communication, visual metaphors have received relatively less attention from researchers, particularly from a design perspective. The limited interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers highlights the gaps in understanding across different academic and geographical backgrounds. Furthermore, the analysis pointed to specific areas that have been understudied, such as visual metaphors in the financial sector, cross-cultural comparisons, and studies focused on South Asian countries. This study could act as the starting for future researchers to select their area of work to build on the knowledge of visual metaphors.