Interpretation of highly visual 'open' advertisements in Dutch magazines

In recent decades magazine advertisers have used an increasing number of highly visual open ads. Open ads do not guide consumers toward a specific interpretation as traditional ads do. An experiment was carried out to establish the effects of openness on interpretation. As expected, openness was found to have an overall negative effect on interpretation because more consumers were unable to interpret open ads and were not able to create their intended interpretation. Contrary to our expectations, however, we did not establish a higher number of alternative interpretations for open ads.