Magazines- component 2, section b

"all media products are purely created to ensure financial success" to what extent do you support this statement? make references to set additions of woman and adbusters

most magazines are driven through profit and power, for example woman, however adbusters is a clear exception to this rule.

Plan

adbusters

  • adbusters- not for profit. £10.99 rrp is used to cover the making of the magazine. however, its not exactly anti-capitalist as they sell merchandise on heir online website.
  • first published in 1989
  • left wing ideologies
  • anti capitalist ideologies
  • luxury item that can only be understood by a niche audience.
  • 120,000 readership/ circulation (not a large amount).
  • self published- published by adbusters media foundation.
  • lack of anchorage, and a lack of commercial intent (no ads), creative.
  • it doesn't have a definite target audience
  • lacks brand image as its style changes every issue, difficult to target a specific group of people.
  • genre- culture jamming.
woman
  • founded in 1967 before start of second world war.
  • woman magazine makes a profit, contains advertisements that contribute to their profits.
  • woman magazine publisher= ipc
  • ipc also owned several other woman's lifestyle magazines, making ipc a horizontally integrated corporation. ipc buys out rival magazines to reduce competition, increasing specialism but lacking creativity (curran and seaton).
  • 7d cover price (about 80p)- cheap cover price for a mass mainstream audience.
  • target audience/ demographic= 30 to 50 year old women, working class, housewife, heterosexual, white.
  • singular, stereotypical representations= there is only one type of women, thin, blonde, hair and make up, this cultivates the ideology that there is only one type of attractive female.
  • reflects the social historical context of the time.
  • readership/circulation is 3 million (12 million women lifestyle magazines sold a week- woman magazine have a 25% market share by itself).


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 socio historical 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 the breeze soap, which features a mid-shot of a stereotypically attractive 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 audience with the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing a hegemonically attractive nude woman. This clear example of sexual objectification is included as a 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 motivated by power and profit. In fact, adbusters is an anticapitalist magazine, that seeks to break the standard conventions of commercial magazines. In the set edition's front cover, the cover line "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 reading. 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 practices- save the planet kill yourself!


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