Assignment #2:Magazine Advertisements Then and Now

Length: 3 - 4 pages
Due Friday, February 21, 2003

This assignment asks you to think about advertising and magazine audiences in historical context. Your paper will offer a comparison between advertising in an issue of a magazine from the 1950s, and advertising in an issue of the same magazine today. Follow these steps to complete the assignment.

Step 1: Data selection
Select a magazine from the list below. Go to a university or public library to find an issue of this magazine that was published between 1954 and 1959. You will be selecting one issue to focus on from this era, and one issue of the same magazine from the present day (2000 or later). You may want to look through a few issues in each era before you settle on the ones you’re going to analyze. If you would like to look at a different magazine, make sure that it was published in the 1950s and is also widely available today. Early issues may not be available in every library and may require the use of microfilm or microfiche.
Life
Good Housekeeping
Sports Illustrated
Time
Reader’s Digest
The New Yorker
The New Republic
Fortune
Ebony
People
Money
National Geographic
Cosmopolitan

Step 2: Analysis
First, look at the editorial content (articles, features, photos, columns, etc.) of the older magazine, and speculate on who you think is the targeted audience (age, race, gender, class status, urban/rural. etc.). Do the same for the current magazine.

Next, look at the advertisements in each of the issues and try to identify patterns by considering them in light of the guidelines for analyzing advertisements, listed below. Select and photocopy (on the “photo” selection of the photocopier if possible) one ad from each magazine that interests you and that will help you to compare and contrast the assumptions regarding advertising and magazine audiences from each era. This will be easiest to do if you can locate advertisements that share some similarity in products or services advertised, or similarities in assumptions about the audience. These photocopies are to be attached to the assignment you turn in, and made into transparencies for class if you’ve volunteered to present your assignment. Analyze the words and visuals of the selected advertisements according to the guidelines below.

Step 3: Writing
Relying on your analysis of the magazine’s editorial content and any patterns in the advertising that you observed, make an argument as to who you think is the target audience of each magazine (e.g., you believe this magazine was designed to appeal to this audience because…). Then, compare and contrast the advertisements from each era. Do you think both issues have the same target audience? Returning to your analysis of the words and visuals of the advertisements, consider the assumptions that were being made by the publisher, editors, and advertisers with regard to the magazine’s readers. How are these assumptions made manifest in the advertisements’ words and images? How have these assumptions changed over time – and/or how have they remained the same? In your paper, you will include some detailed explanations of the advertisements you analyze as well as at least two citations from class readings that help you to describe and locate the assumptions of the earlier ads in historical context (readings: Marling,“Autoeroticism;” Osgleby, “A Caste, a Culture, a Market,” Kozol, “Gazing at Race in the Pages of Life,” or Curtis, “Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, Ch. 1 & 3).

The paper should be 3 – 4 pages, typed, double-spaced. Attach the advertisements you’ve analyzed, and include the magazine’s title and date. Don’t forget to attach the School’s honor code. You can either type it on your cover page or print it out. This assignment is due Friday, February 21, 2003.

Guidelines for Analyzing Advertisements:
This outline is intended to help you with the analysis of advertisements. This is simply a list of features that are often worth looking at; you do not need to write about all of these features. You should choose to focus on a few aspects for each advertisement that help to make your point.
1. Consider language:
a. Pronouns: I and you suggest a sense of interaction, but so can he, she, we, they, because they draw on some sense of shared knowledge between writer and reader, and on a sense of social categories. What is assumed about the reader’s relationship to those depicted in the advertisement? Who is assumed to have power over whom?
b. Time and Space: Words like here, there, today, now, then, come, and go all have means relative to a particular place or time. Verb form is also relevant: the use of past, present, and continuing can all locate the reader in relation to interpretation.
c. Speech Acts: These are the actions that can be performed by speaking: requesting, blaming, promising, inviting. Consider whether the ad directly tells you to buy the product or uses some other form of speech act to encourage you to do so.
d. Testimonials, Endorsements, and Legitimacy: An expert on the item is sometimes cited to give the advertisement added credibility, or to give the product additional appeal. Sometimes these endorsements include specific reference to an expert’s use of a product. Occasionally, the endorsement is implied, as when “everyone” is understood to be using a certain product. Or, the product may be related to something – a government program or official, the army, a religious community -- that gives it increased legitimacy.

2. Consider visuals:
a. Types and Stereotypes: How do the people in the image relate to an idealized image of people in a particular social category? (e.g., “the American woman,” “Arabs,” “natives”).
b. Composition: Distance and Framing: Look at how close the subjects of the ad are assumed to be in relation to the reader (e.g., is this an extreme close-up or does it establish a broad context?). Consider how the ad is framed: who is included, what is in the center, what might be cut out.
c. Social power: Consider how the people in the pictures relate to each other. Are they dressed in the same way? Are they performing the same task? Does one have more power than the other (e.g., one has the right to move freely while the other is more permanently located; one is serving the other; one makes sexual advances toward the other)?
d. Placement of Figures, Gaze, and Expression: Consider how the people in the pictures relate to the viewer. Are they facing us, as if they are aware of our gaze – or are they unaware of us? Is one looking at another person in the ad while one is looking at us, the reader? Is he/she looking at the product advertised? Is everyone happy, excited, bored?
e. Props and Costume: Consider how the people are dressed and what they are holding or doing. What do these things tell us about how these people may be understood in relation to others: are they to serve others, or to be served (e.g., they’re in charge)?

3. Consider words and pictures together:
a. Go back and forth between words and pictures. Does one preceed the other? How do the images reinforce the meaning of the text? How do the words and pictures work together to shape the interpretation for the reader?
b. What kinds of messages are being communicated by the ads? (e.g., values, beliefs, attitudes about the world, about society, about people and relationships)