viz.

If you are teaching advertising in the visual rhetoric section of your course, you will probably be interested in Donald Gunn’s 12 Categories of Advertisements. Slate’s Seth Stevenson has recently posted a slideshow demonstrating them all.

One of my favorite things about this post is they way Stevenson questions the categorizations and where they overlap—is there really 12 types, or fewer basic types that are combined in different ways?—and suggests that the list works not only as a way for advertisers to get ideas, but also as a means of education for consumers. Here’s the last paragraph of the slideshow:

To me, the 12 formats serve equally well as a weapon of defense for the consumer under assault from endless advertising messages. It's like learning how a magic trick works: Once the secret’s revealed, the trick loses all its power.