Metaphor and the Social World 3:2 (2013), 199–219. doi 10.1075/msw.3.2.05hid issn 2210–4070 / e-issn 2210–4097 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Metaphorical creativity and recontextualization in multimodal advertisements on e-business across time Laura Hidalgo Downing, Blanca Kraljevic Mujic and Begoña Núñez-Perucha Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid In this article we explore the creative recontextualization of JOURNEY, WAR, RACE and SPORTS metaphors and discuss their manifestations in multimodal ICT advertisements across time. Our objectives are to discuss (i) the choices of metaphors and related source domains used to describe (e)businesses in two dif- ferent time periods, (ii) how the highlighting and hiding of features of the source domains remain constant or change, (iii) the relations between modes, and (iv) the discursive strategies for metaphorical creativity. Te results of our analy- sis refect an interesting shif in the highlighting and hiding of features of the main metaphors and related sources across the two time periods, thus revealing variations in emergent metaphors across time. We argue that these results refect ongoing social changes which illustrate the contextual basis and motivation of metaphor as a linguistic form of action and creative communication in advertis- ing discourse. Keywords: advertising discourse, (e-)business, metaphorical creativity, multimodal metaphor, recontextualization, time variation. 1. Introduction In the present article we report a study of multimodal metaphors in ICT advertis- ing discourse across two time periods, 1999–2002 and 2010–2012. 1 Te end of the 90s is a particularly interesting moment in time for new technologies, with the World Wide Web seeing the light of day for the frst time at the CERN laboratory in 1990. Tis historical background of great technological innovation would rap- idly produce enormous changes in the way we understand and establish human