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Within an ad, many ways can be used to get the attention of the target audience, including:

Questions

Questions are the most obvious, most explicit, and most common of the verbal lead-ins used as attention-getters in advertising copy. In most cases, these "rhetorical questions" used by writers and speakers are not really meant to get an external reply from readers and listeners. But, such rhetorical questions are meant to prompt an internal response:


Who? What? Why? When? Where? How?

Do you? Can you? Will you? Why not?

How soon? Why pay more?


In person-to-person selling, certain questions are used as standard formalities. Sales clerks are trained to ask polite questions designed both to be pleasant "openers" and also to elicit a response: "May I help you?" "Are you looking for a gift?" "Would you like to see something special?" "Have you heard about this?" "Do you have any questions?"

If such phrases are not used, some people are offended by the rudeness or curtness. If such formalities are misused or overused, then they seem phony, artificial, or obsequious.
In the new interactive media (such as clicking on the internet) the question-answer format can be used to channel or to guide responses, or to elicit specific answers.

Interactive Q&A not only uses the obvious ways (True/False or Multiple Choice), but also can ask open-ended questions, and then computer search the answers for key words or cues.

Back to Cognitive Attention-Getters