Have you ever looked through a magazine and found it to be really interesting? That is because you are part of its target audience. You are part of a group of people that the magazine is trying to appeal to. There is a reason Sports Illustrated is more of a man’s magazine and Family Circle is more of a woman’s magazine. The people that run that magazine put certain things in those magazines to attract their audience. More commonly, men are interested in sports and anything to do with sports. In Sports Illustrated, the reader would find sports, and that is it. The reader would not find an article titled “How working women balance their careers and home lives.” An article such as that would be found in a magazine like Family Circle, as it is targeted more towards women who have a family. For the purpose of this audience visual analysis, I will be discussing the October 8th, 2012 issue of People magazine. Looking at this issue and reading through the magazine, it is evident that the publishers do have a target audience in mind. This visual analysis will discuss who its target audience is and how the reader can tell. Also, the essay will discuss how the magazine makes the advertisements relevant to its audience. To start, the target audience of People magazine is women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-two because of the article topics and advertisements. The women would have a high-school education at the most because a lot of the advertisements are for items that are not really expensive. Those women would be of the white race and be located in the states of California or New York and this is because most of the women pictured are of the white race. The reason for California or New York is because the women in these areas hav... ... middle of paper ... ... This is inferred because the articles are about current celebrities and their lives. These would interest those women more than it would a fifty year old man. One can also say that the reader will not see an article about fishing in People magazine because that is not relevant to the target audience. Magazines also have advertisements that would appeal to that target audience. People has advertisements for items such as makeup and face wash which would appeal to young adult women and not an older woman who is in her sixties or seventies. Just like with the articles, one can say that the reader will not find an advertisement for Viagra or for Copenhagen chewing tobacco. It is not relevant to the target audience. This is how a magazine becomes successful and sells a lot of issues. It would not sell as much if it did not stay focused on a particular target audience.
Swanson, D., and Johnston, D. "A Content Analysis of Motherhood Ideologies and Myths in Magazines." Invisible Mothers. New York: Plenum Publishing Corporation, 2003. 21-31.
Advertising is a form of communication involving selling a product to modify the behavior of the buyer into buying the product. In the essay, “Advertising’s fifteenth appeals”, Fowles explains how advertisers see the readers through the magazines and the appeals they use to influence the readers. Magazines target the audience as meant to satisfy their desires for love, attention, or the feeling to be secured and safe. For example, Cosmopolitan magazine sees the readers as flawed individuals who should change themselves to be accepted by others. Most of the appeals used to influence those audiences are “the need of escape”, “attention” and “the need to satisfy curiosity”.
I have examined and analyzed the COVERGIRL™ NatureLuxe advertisement that uses common feminine stereotypes. In this advertisement, COVERGIRL™, which runs in Seventeen magazines, targets women through their choices of colors, fonts, and images used. Certain stereotypes are used; such as, those who are more feminine tend to prefer lighter, happier colors, such as pink. Also, the use of a celebrity, who many young women look to as an icon, assists in the advertisement of the COVERGIRL™ product. COVERGIRL™, more than likely, is able to successfully market their lip-gloss product in the United States by using common gender stereotypes to show femininity and how those, mainly women, should be presented in today’s society.
The Home Depot is a supplier of home goods and appliances such as refrigerators, grills, and paint. The store often uses visual advertisements to attract customers. In these ads there are portrayals of both men and women, which help to illustrate the gender scripts that are prevalent within society. To analyze these illustrations and come to conclusions in terms of stereotypical gender scripts in commercials, a visual sociology research project was completed.
...ce in society. And the effects of the ideals behind these magazines are all the more powerful because of their subtlety." Women walk away from these magazines with an empty feeling and feelings of many inadequacies and they really don't know exactly why. The subtle undermining of women's intelligence and cause strips away their sense of worth ever so slowly and leaves them feeling depressed and in search of something that really can't exist together. Growing old while staying young takes many years of complete and internal happiness not many years of collagen injections and the added stress of having to stay unattainably perfect. While some consider these journalists for women's magazines talented writers, I consider them horrendous displays of talent in which they sell out the naturally beautiful women of the world for a quick buck and a popular magazine.
Firminger examines the ways these magazines represent young males and females. She reveals that these magazines talks about the physical appearance of young girls but also their sexuality, emotions, and love life. The author informs how the advice given by the magazines is negative. The author also argues that these magazines focus more on their social life than how their academic performance
Over the last few decades, there has been a significant rise in the number of women receiving college educations and a decrease in gender discrimination due to federal law. These two societal factors have helped the average woman to attain a higher paying job than ever before in our history. Presently, women are earning over half of all accounting degrees, 4 out of 10 law degrees, and just about that many medical degrees (Krotz 1). Therefore this gender group, which makes up about half of the American population, has a lot of monetary power. As a result, when women reach the peak of their earning power, they will have money to burn (Krotz 1). Women reach this peak around the age of 40 or older. In the last year alone, of all the women who purchased a new car, 53% were over 40 and so were 60% of those who bought new computers (Quinlan53). Evidently, the majority of buyers are older women. So why then is there a noticeable lack of this age group of women in magazine advertisements?
Vanessa Hazell and Juanne Clarke. “Race and Gender in the Media: A Content Analysis of Advertisements in Two Mainstream Black Magazines.” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Sep., 2008), pp. 5-21
I would determine that the intended audience for Us Weekly is women who are into fashion, celebrity news, and gossip. The more precise audience for this issue would be mothers in all stages of life who are interested in how celebrity moms approach
My hypothesis was proven true to a certain point. As I thumbed through the twelve models in the running for Playmate of the year, as I suspected, none of the models were over the age of 30. The oldest of the 12 models was age 26. However, my hypothesis stated that I would not find any women in an entire issue of Playboy, not just the models. On page 51 of the 1997 January issue was and interview featuring Whoopi Goldberg. There was not one, not two, but three photographs of the 41-year-old actress. In this entire issue of Playboy, there was a woman over the age of 30; thus my hypothesis was proven wrong. However, I still conclude that ageism still existed in this issue of Playboy Magazine. Why? The answer is because no models over the age of 30 had been chosen to appear nude in this issue. I believe it is because Playboy wants to portray youth as beautiful to its selected reader. The firm bodies and youthful smiles of women under the age of thirty is what Playboy’s editors consider beautiful.
The media intents on trying at times not to be bias or favorable but when prompted to in accordance to time figure, “…gender and race often interact in how people are portrayed in the media” (Hazell and Clarke 9). With time it has been shown that the implications of mediated ideologies have improved but can still be portrayed as one ideal if one happens to take a closer look. In the early 1900’s, “Colfax and Sternberg found that in 54% of the magazine ads, Black people were portrayed in lower status occupations, ...
Zimmerman, Amanda and John Dahlberg. “The Sexual Objectification of Women in Advertising: A Contemporary Cultural Perspective.” Journal of Advertising Research 48.1 (March 2008): 71-79. Business Source Premier. EBSCOhost. Howland High School Lib., OH. Web. 28 March 2014 .
Advertising in American culture has taken on the very interesting character of representing our culture as a whole. Take this Calvin Klein ad for example. It shows the sexualization of not only the Calvin Klein clothing, but the female gender overall. It displays the socially constructed body, or the ideal body for women and girls in America. Using celebrities in the upper class to sell clothing, this advertisement makes owning a product an indication of your class in the American class system. In addition to this, feminism, and how that impacts potential consumer’s perception of the product, is also implicated. Advertisements are powerful things that can convey specific messages without using words or printed text, and can be conveyed in the split-second that it takes to see the image. In this way, the public underestimates how much they are influenced by what they see on television, in magazines, or online.
Curry and Clarke’s article believe in a strategy called “visual literacy” which develops women and men’s roles in advertisements (1983: 365). Advertisements are considered a part of mass media and communications, which influence an audience and impact society as a whole. Audiences quickly begin to rely on messages sent through advertisements and can create ideologies of women and men. These messages not only are extremely persuasive, but they additionally are effective in product consumption in the media (Curry and Clarke 1983:
Social Media plays an important part in America and the role that beauty plays in our everyday lives. Young girls are getting exposed each day to magazines, bil...