The paper deals with the analysis of the category of imperativeness in advertising discourse in Croatian, Hungarian and Slovenian, and is divided into eight thematic units. In the first chapter, the differences between imperativeness as a pragmatic category and imperative as a grammatical category is defined by formal criteria. Also, their connection with directivity and speech acts are established. In the second part of the paper, the main features of the advertising discourse and its place within the traditional division of the standard language into functional styles are presented. Particular attention is paid to the ways and means in which stimulus-based action is expressed in advertising discourse, i.e. directivity (grammatical category of imperatives and alternative expressions of imperativeness). After the contrastive analysis of the ways and means of expressing imperativeness in Croatian, Hungarian and Slovenian language on a formal level, the last part of the paper presents the results of the analysis of imperativeness in the advertising discourse of three languages, which was conducted by the corpus of four categories of advertising messages: advertising messages promoting cars, advertising messages of banks, teleoperators, and alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages and food.