After a period of aggressive conglomeration, IPC media was formally established in 1963, publishing a rang of newspapers and magazines, including The Sun (long since sold off) and, of course, Woman magazine. As with many media conglomerates, things got pretty crazy after that, but now IPC still exists in the form of Time Inc UK, which continues to publish Woman and a range of other magazines targeting a broadly conservative, middle aged audience.
The Time Inc UK website is an excellent example of a corporate website, hosted by the horizontally integrated conglomerate primarily in order to sell advertising space. And in order to sell advertising space, it is absolutely essential to demonstrate explicitly the target audience of the brand itself.
Below is the corporate page for Woman magazine. As you can see, it is not targeting readers of Woman, but the potential advertisers. Read through the screencaps below, collected in January 2019, and consider the following:
What brands primarily target 40 plus women, and therefore would be interested in advertising in Woman?
What is the implication of the term 'mass-market'?
What are the consequences of targeting a mass-market audience?
Curren and Seaton argued that media concentration from aggressive conglomeration (of which IPC would be an EXCELLENT example) leads to standardised, boring, non-challenging and potentially ideologically manipulative products. Clearly this applies to the 1964 edition of Woman. But can you pick out some explicit examples?
Does IPC (now TI) offer it's audiences a pluralised range of experiences? No? Why not?
