Abstract: (The crisis as a selling point: a linguistic approach of some Portuguese and French commercials). The crisis – and its impact on consumers – has forced companies to reposition their communication. Some of them have deliberately chosen the current economic and financial climate, which shows how crisis can have a selling value. In our attempt to study the impact of crisis on advertising, we analyse two types of corpora: print ads published in 2008-2011 in the magazines Visão (Portugal) and Le Nouvel Observateur (France) and some video ads broadcast during the same period. Both the use of the term crisis and its numerous qualifying relations show this concept’s polymorphic reference in current advertising discourse. The word crisis and its lexical field appear in Portuguese and French ads both implicitly and explicitly, according to the type of product one tries to sell. The quantitative analysis of our corpus allowed us to identify three recurrent lexical fields: the metaphorical lexical field (eg. ads for banking products that refer to the crising without the term being mentioned), the psychological lexical field that refers to emotions associated with the crisis (tranquility and optimism vs. uncertainty and anxiety), and the axiological lexical field, related to the values that are thought to help to overcome the crisis (ads that include various axiological lexemes, that use a humorous tone).