  In order to convey the most content in their limited space, advertisements
embed references to outside knowledge via symbolism. For example, a motorcycle
stands for adventure (a positive property the ad wants associated with the
product being sold), and a gun stands for danger (a negative property to
dissuade viewers from undesirable behaviors). We show how to use symbolic
references to better understand the meaning of an ad. We further show how
anchoring ad understanding in general-purpose object recognition and image
captioning improves results. We formulate the ad understanding task as matching
the ad image to human-generated statements that describe the action that the ad
prompts, and the rationale it provides for taking this action. Our proposed
method outperforms the state of the art on this task, and on an alternative
formulation of question-answering on ads. We show additional applications of
our learned representations for matching ads to slogans, and clustering ads
according to their topic, without extra training.
