Magazines - component 2 section b - explore how the set editions of Woman and Adbusters appeal to their target audiences

You've got to use these double page spreads...

You can find better quality scans of the above spread by clicking here!

...and you've got to use all these audience terms...

Niche

Mainstream

Positioning

Anchorage

Demographic

Preferred

Negotiated

Oppositional

Alienating 

Fetishism

Patriarchal hegemony

Cultivation

Pick & mix

Target

Secondary

Modes of address

...and you've got to reference the industrial and sociohistorical context!

WOMAN

Cultivates hegemonic capitalist ideological perspective

Founded in 1937

7d cover price (approx 80p) - cheap cover price for a mass mainstream audience

Target demographic: 30-50 year old working class, housewife, heterosexual, white

Singular stereotypical representations

Reflects the social historical context of the time

Circulation 3 million copies sold each week: big market share!

(12 million women's lifestyle magazines sold in UK each week)

IPC also owned several other women's lifestyle magazines

Published by IPC, a horizontally integrated corporation

IPC buys out rival magazines, reducing competition and increasing specialism

Lack of creativity

ADBUSTERS

Not for profit

Anti Capitalist

First published in 1989

Broadly left wing ideology

£10:99 UK cover price - expensive cover price targeting a niche and middle class audience

120,000 readership/circulation

Bimonthly frequency

Self published: Adbusters Media Foundation

Complete lack of anchorage, and a complete lack of commercial intent

Culture jamming/detournement/brandalism

Ill defined target audience

Lacks brand image - masthead changes every issue

Lack of corporate restriction may lead to creative freedom

Analysis

Woman

• Central image positions target female audience with a light-hearted mode of address
• Use of older, mature model appeals to mature audience: aspirational. Stereotypically attractive... but not unobtainable 
• Theme of article: men! Presents men as both hypermasculine and mysterious: "man size bottles". Masculinity is power! Appeals to audience by creating a gender binary. Hegemonically appealing.
• Men are othered "that's where we differ"
• Insider information on men: cultivates heteronormative view of the world
• Audiences can pick and mix their own ideology. Feminist audiences can take pleasure in the explicit image of a woman crushing a man's head

Adbusters

• Sophisticated lexis "disintegration of the polar ice sheets". Assumed knowledge of climate change and global warming. 
• Climate change theme reinforced through the code 350 PPM (parts per million) a reference to concentration of greenhouse gasses. Once more, a sophisticated mode of address. 
• Appeals to target audience through presenting agreeable political message: that there is a discrepancy between rich and poor, and this is affecting the climate
• Rejection of commodity fetishism through ruined, rough post-production techniques. Steve neale's theory of genre: of repetition and in this case difference. Reinforces anti capitalist beliefs
• Pick and mix - can enjoy the magazine from a design and aesthetic perspective
• Reading the magazine provides the audience with cultural capital, and also allows social interaction with other left wing/anarchist/anti capitalists
• Oppositional reading: audiences may feel disgusted by the homeless person, and might take exception to her presence