In the face of the massiveness of content, social advertisements must explore the potential of other dimensions to improve their designs. This paper examines the effect of different levels of graphic explicitness on the attention and perception of road safety ads. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to assess the visual attention of 60 young millennials and centennials on three ads with images of different levels of explicitness. Participants were agrouped into two groups where they watched two road safety ads with negative valence, but with different levels of explicitness in the second ad seen. For the image and text of each ad, metrics of number of fixations, time to first fixation and total fixation time spent were compared. A survey provided qualitative information about the perception and effectiveness of the ads. Significant effects were found when using negative emotional appeals through explicitness to enhance visual attention and audience perception. But, although the image has prominence, textual design should not be neglected to focus the emotional appeal of the ad.