The paper looks at two types of Polish data; political speech and TV advertisements, which, having similar aims but rather different status, may possibly use the same means to achieve success. The relevance framework is applied to analyse and compare the mechanisms behind the linguistic effects and looks into particular stages of processing the linguistic input, taking a closer look into the explicature in both the political speech of a TV election campaign and TV advertisements. Particular pragmatic processes are presented (disambiguation, ad hoc concept construction) as well as implicature formation, non-literal talk and covert communication in order to address the question of whether political speech and advertising are similar and, if yes, in what respects and to what extent.