Magazines - component 2 section b
"All media products are purely created to ensure financial success" To what extent do you support this statement? Make reference to the set editions of Woman and Adbusters
Knee Jerk reactions:
Most magazines are driven through power and profit, for example woman, however Adbusters is a clear exception of this rule.
Plan
Knee Jerk reactions:
Most magazines are driven through power and profit, for example woman, however Adbusters is a clear exception of this rule.
Plan
- Not for profit magazine - Adbusters
- Anticapitalist - Adbusters
- Motivated by profit - Woman
- Women magazine reinforces hegemonic capitalist norms
Adbusters:
- Adbusters published 6 times a year - bimonthly frequency
- First published in 1989 - self published - Adbusters media foundation
- Price - £10.99*UK cover price as no adverts for a niche middle class audience
- circulation : 120,000 readership
- Genre: independent, campaigning, culture jamming
- Broadly left wing ideology and anticapitalist
- Complete lack of anchorage, and a complete lack of commercial content (detournement, brandalism)
- Not for profit magazine
- Ill defined target audience
- Lacks brand image - masthead changes every issue
Woman:
- 1964
- Founded in 1937
- IPC is the publisher, they own several other womens lifestyle magazines - horizontally integrated corporation, they buy out rival magazines to reduce competition and increase specialism - lack of creativity
- 7p cover price (approx 80p) for a mass main stream audience
- reached 12m of womens lifestyle magazines copy per week (women had 25% market share of this)
- Circulation: 3 million copies sold each week
- set edition
- Target demographic: 30 - 50 year old, housewife, heterosexual, white
- Singular stereotypical representations
- Reflects the social historical context of the time
One clear example of a magazine driven purely by financial success and the concentration of power is woman magazine. In the 1964 set edition, we see a clear ideological perspective being constructed which is highly appropriate to the sociohistorical context of the time it was made. This is typified by the relentless promotion of a hegemonically acceptable heterosexual, working class lifestyle. An excellent example of this is the advert for Breeze soap, which features a mid shot of a stereotypically attractive young woman wearing no clothes. Her body is emphasised through the mise en scene of soap suds, and the bath itself has been removed to provide the target audience with the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing a hegemonically attractive nude women. This clear example of sexual objectification is included as means of manipulating a singular and mass market audience. The advert reinforces and cultivates the ideology that women purely exist to be the subject of a heterosexual male gaze. By reinforcing a patriarchal hegemonic ideology, the producer encourages the primary mass audience to take on this role, ensuring that they adopt a subservient lifestyle. This is a clear construction of a mass audience.
However Adbusters subverts the commonly held perspective that all media products are solely motivated by power and profit. In fact Adbusters is a resolutely anticapitalist magazine, that seeks to break the standard conventions of commercial magazine. In the set editions front cover, the coverline Post west encodes the ideological aftermath of decades of terrorist attacks on the western world. Adbusters routinely lacks anchorage however, and there is nothing on the front cover to explicitly suggest any preferred readings. Instead, the audience are positioned in such a way that they must form their own conclusions. This makes adbusters highly unconventional and goes against the notion that all media products are solely focused on profit and power.
Further paragraph ideas:
Niche vs mainstream audiences
Major conglomeration owned vs independent ownership
Differences in regulation practises - save the planet kill yourself
Ethics of being purely motivated by profit: lack of creativity
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