Although English has been shown to be the most frequently used foreign language in product advertisements in countries where it is not the native language, little is known about its effects. This article examines the response to advertisements in English compared to the response to the same ad in the local language in Western Europe on members of the target group for which the ad was intended: 715 young, highly educated female consumers. The use of English in a product ad does not appear to have any impact on image and price of the product, but it does affect text comprehension: the meaning of almost 40% of the English phrases was not understood. These results were the same for all countries involved in the study, irrespective of whether the respondents’ (self-) reported proficiency in English is high or low. To investigate whether the senders of the ad, the advertising agencies, are correct in their assumption that the English text of ads is understood by the target group, we tested H1 (all consumers are able to give an accurate indication of the meaning of the English text of advertisements). This hypothesis was not confirmed. The respondents’ actual comprehension of the English texts of the ads was low: in 39% of all cases, the respondents were not able to indicate the meaning of the English phrases. The makers of advertisements also use English because they believe that it gives the product advertised an aura of modernity and luxury and that they can therefore charge a higher price. In order to investigate whether the use of English has such an effect on the target group, we tested H2 (Products presented in advertisements with English are more associated with modernity than the same products presented in advertisements in a local language) and H3 (Products presented in advertisements with English are considered to be more expensive than the same products presented in advertisements in a local language). The findings of our research show that both these hypotheses were not confirmed, at least not for our respondent group of highly educated young women, the target group of the ads. For all three ads, and across all six of the investigated areas in Western Europe, our respondents did not view products advertised using English, as more modern (H2) or more expensive (H3) than products that were advertised using only the local language. There were differences between the countries in their actual comprehensibility of the phrases (H4). The comprehensibility was significantly higher in France, the Netherlands, French-speaking Belgium, and Spain than in Dutch-speaking Belgium and Germany. If we compare our findings with the findings of the 2006 Euro barometer data, which were based on whether respondents thought they were able to hold a conversation in English, then we see that H4 (The higher the percentage of people in a country who are able to hold a conversation in English, the better the English text of an advertisement will be understood) is not confirmed.