This study classified the type of visual metaphor in ads as explicit and implicit metaphor and examined how different types of metaphor affect consumer awareness of creativity in ads. Specifically, an experiment was performed to explore how different combination of explicit and implicit metaphor in ads influences consumer awareness of relevance and divergence in ads. Results show that high explicit/high implicit metaphor ad induced higher relevance awareness than high explicit/low implicit metaphor ad and low explicit/high implicit metaphor ad. However, it was found that divergence awareness was better in high explicit/low implicit metaphor ad and low explicit/high implicit metaphor ad than high explicit/high implicit metaphor ad. The study also investigated the moderating role of consumer need for cognition (NFC) in divergence awareness. Findings indicate that, for low NFC participants, divergence awareness was higher in high explicit/low implicit metaphor ad than low explicit/high implicit metaphor ad, whereas, for high NFC participants, there was no difference in divergence awareness between the two metaphor ads. Implications and further research on the effect of metaphoric ad and design of creative ads were discussed.