Abstract
This article examines interpretive completeness in multimodal advertising in the digital media environment, where reduced verbal content must still yield semantically dense messages that are rapidly processed. Contemporary short formats (posts, banners, stories, short videos) typically offer not extended argumentation or a linear plot, but a minimal semantic “node” —a slogan/caption, a visual image, a compositional configuration, and (in dynamic formats) an editing junction—yet this node is perceived as coherent and complete. The paper substantiates the need for a procedural account of this effect: inventories of semiotic resources(text/image/sound) do not explain the operations by which recipients reconstruct causality, event structure, and evaluative stance under conditions of limited explicitness. The empirical basis is a corpus of 60 complete advertising messages from print and digital media (verbal–visual and audiovisual units). The methodologyincludes (1) multimodal segmentation with systematic registration of the status and placement of the verbalcomponent; (2) reconstruction of input spaces and the blended interpretive space in terms of conceptual integration; (3) identification of cross-domain transfers within visual/multimodal metaphor; and (4) protocolbased documentation of semantic compression using the format “what is compressed—by what it is compensated.” The findings show that, in short formats, the slogan functions primarily as a discursive operator rather than as “brief product information”: it constrains the polysemy of the visual frame, specifies the inference domain, and marks an axiological frame, thereby directing interpretation. Semantic compression systematically targets causal, temporal, and role relations (agency, conditions, intermediate action phases, and resultparameters), while interpretive completeness is maintained through intermodal compensation via scene construction, compositional vectors, editing logic, and indexical cues of action/state. The proposed parameterization translates qualitative observations into a comparable descriptive protocol and supports the diagnosis of interpretive risks in advertising design (excessive polysemy, conflicts between inference domains, breakdown of causal modeling).