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During class a week ago
we examined fitness magazines for men. We got a muscle magazine and were asked
to go through and examine the ads and categorize them by either: A-Technologies
of the body or B- Adornment and display of the body. Throughout the magazine
there were 104 ads that we examined. An overwhelming 58.6% of those ads were
for dietary supplements, which makes sense seeing that it is a muscle and
fitness magazine for men. Many of these ads positioned the men as inferior.
This seems to be an effective way to advertise for dietary supplements because
these advertisements show intense body builders lifting weights and the ad
shows that if you take this supplement you can be like those guys. The next
highest percentage was in the knowledge systems category with 22% of the ad
space. It is worth mentioning that our group had to decipher between what
counted as a dietary supplement ad and what counted as a knowledge systems ad.
For the Women’s Sports
Illustrated magazine, we were assigned to count the photos throughout the
magazine that represented the themes of women acting as one of the following;
athletic competence, ambivalence, all-American girl next door, hyper
heterosexual, sexy babe, and soft pornography. We found that out of 21 photos
evaluated, 57.1% represented women as “athletic competence”. Our group felt
that this made sense seeing that Sports Illustrated magazines are kept usually
pretty PG rated. However, there were 14.2% of the photos that represented women
as “Sexy Babe”, but there were 0 that represented any kind of “soft porn”.
I agree that the majority of the ads in a muscle magazine for men are going to be for dietary supplements, that does make sense. If you are buying that magazine obviously they assume that you are interested in getting big muscles which usually come from supplements and sometimes they put new workouts in there too but if they are trying to sell their products they want to sell supplements. However knowledge system ads are also a very good way to try and convince people to buy your supplement instead of just a picture of a body builder because most people when taking supplements want to do research on them and understand what they are putting in their bodies first and how they are going to work, if they work at all.
ReplyDeleteBy: Matt Goryance
By: Anthony Alford
ReplyDeleteI have never truly understood the goals of these muscle and fitness magazines until we examined them in class. It is unbelieveable how much effort the publishers go through to position their readers as inferior with the use of oversized men in these books. The sad reality is that so many of their readers buy into what these guys are selling because they lack the confidence to realize they are perfectly fine with the way they already look. The publishers are setting their audience up for disappointment and failure in the long-run with the amount of dietary supplements ADs. Magazines like this reveals a somewhat deeper issue. I believe it contributes to the downfall of our society because it is giving people false hope (fantasy) on how they should look compared to a more realistic goal for a body image. The publishers of this magazine will continue to appeal to those who are not smart enough to understand the difference between fantasy body image in the future and realistic improved body image in the future.
By: Taylor Cook
ReplyDeleteThe dietary supplement craze to me is getting worse with each muscle and fitness magazine that is published. Almost every other article you see in the entire magazine is some extremely muscular guy trying to get you to buy some type of supplement. I am a frequent reader of the muscle and fitness magazine and it is becoming annoying to me as a consistent reader. I for one try not to pay attention to any of the supplements because I know that they are just trying to sucker you in to buying from them. They are even starting to do it with women in the magazine as well, because in my opinion they feel like the female audience is much more gullible and will buy the products based off of the picture results they see in the magazine. The main thing I would tell people when reading muscle and fitness magazine is that with a good balanced diet, and proper exercise each day, you can achieve the fitness goals you desire.
By: Taylor Brown
ReplyDeleteI really liked this post and thought it was very interesting. I can't believe the amount of dietary ads there were in the magazines that we viewed. It felt as if half of the pages in the magazines alone were just ads, most of them being for a dietary supplement. They were most prevelant in the men's magazines but we also saw a large amount in the women's magazines as well. I think that it is wrong for these companies to try and convince people that they are not good enough the way that they are. They attempt to lure people in by convincing them that their body is not satisfactory, which isn't always the case. People are easily swayed by people in pictures and believe that they should look like that, which isn't always the case. People can be healthy without having to go overboard like the ads in these magazines suggest.
After doing this class activity one aspect that I found really interesting was the amount of information that companies tried to force feed men through their magazines. I thought it was insane how much writing went into some of these products within men magazines. As a result, I think this is why companies or products wont ever see a high retention rate from their advertisements. The attempt of trying to seem innovative, by describing new equipment, dietary, or trans formative products with mass amounts of writing kills the intent of the advertisement. After awhile, people, including myself, just begin to stop reading these advertisements because the amount of information to read becomes annoying and repetitive through magazines. If editors of magazines could eliminate some of the writing within these advertisements that wasn’t needed, they would have better success selling. Their advertisements would be able to reach out to a greater amount of their audience and have higher retention rates with sticking to the main points of products.
ReplyDeleteBy Anthony Pape