Month: May 2010

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In what ways do Zoo and Nuts target a different audience? A sample answer

Within a few weeks, from having no men’s magazines, there are now two! They both have different target audiences however.

‘Nuts’ is aiming for the 16-24 year olds and come from the same publishing house as ‘Loaded’ and ‘Uncut’. Recent research showed that younger males are often embarrassed to buy magazines such a s ‘FHM’ and ‘Loaded’ because they feel they can’t leave them around in case others pick them up.

Nuts has addressed this issue, as one letter from the 6th –13th Feb 2004 edition says, ‘I like it (Nuts magazine) in particular because I can leave it lying round the house without worrying about the kids picking it up and seeing something awkward for me to explain.’

They still feature photo-shoots of women with not many clothes on but nothing is shown. There are even straplines such as ‘Jordan’s jungle strip show.’

When Nuts launched a million magazines were given away for free, the next two issues were half price and there was a mass of adverts in different media forms including television commercials where women were warned not to expect any help on a Thursday (because that’s the day Nuts gets into the shops). This was necessary because Zoo Weekly was being launched the next week. The adverts were seen as funny which was needed as it provided a talking point for the target audience.

Zoo Weekly’s TV advert features people running up a hill to a giant Zoo magazine but this wasn’t as funny so will tend to be forgotten by the younger audience.

The language in Nuts is occasionally colloquial… “Their recommended daily does is two – Ryder necks all 28 of them!” The magazine adopts a rather matey tone to appeal to the men in this age group.

There aren’t many adverts in the early issues… possibly because in the first few weeks they want to build up a reputation for content, not for having a high proportion of adverts. On of the advertisements they do have is for Blockbuster Video, advertising a horror film, ‘Wrong Turn’ and Tomb Raider’, featuring Angelina Jolie. This emphasises that the target audience is men aged 16-24 who like scary movies and attractive women in action films.

In the nuts press release, it was said, “With fascinating stories and memorable photography, Nuts will be the fuel for conversations in bars up and down the land.”

Mentioning bars in the press release reinforces the stereotypical image of the 16-24 year old male….(who is carefree, has few responsibilities or ties, probably still lives at home and has few financial drains on his resources.)

The “fascinating stories” is mentioned because the stories intend to be interesting… (unusual, offbeat and quirky, not run of the mill) to read for example a Ford Mustang for £15k and a whale that exploded in the middle of the road. (Generally speaking text only runs to approximately 12.5% of each article ensuring that the photos are more prominent and important, also conoting that the reader isn’t so much interested in reading articles as looking at pictures)

‘Zoo Weekly’ is targeted towards the slightly older 24-35 year old male. This has been done for many reasons. One of which is that these ages are more predictable for advertisers and as Herman and Chomsky identified, ‘Advertisers are more interested in wealthier audiences.‘ This way it separates itself slightly from ‘Nuts’ too. (In fact the younger age range of Nuts is less likely to have so much disposable income, despite living at home with few overheads and a more or less free reign over what they spend their money on, these young men aren’t yet earning the bigger bucks of the next age group. They are of course being encouraged to Dream On!)

‘Zoo’ features Nell McAndrew on the front but whereas in ‘Nuts’ Kelly Brock has a cheerful, wide-mouthed friendly smile (the variety identified by Marjorie Ferguson as the ‘super-smiler’: confident, assertive, big smile = the hard sell), Nell is seductive with her red bikini and her hair wet as if from swimming, thus creating the image of temptress: seductive and sensual.

The older audience is targeted by the sex-related features. The male gaze theory of Laura Mulvey’s is seen to be true by many of the photos, such as the Angelina Jolie feature of her sex scenes in various films. (Giving the impression that this is all men want in a woman.) The captions tend to humorous (although often coarse and or sexist) ‘The auditions for womb raider were going well.‘ Or downright vulgar ‘He’d literally f****d her to death‘, not language you’d expect to see in a men’s weekly (or at least not suitable coffee table material.!) The strapline on the cover, ‘Chin up sexy‘ is also an example of arrogant (and blatant objectification!) language which separates the Zoo reader from the Nuts male.

Zoo Weekly tends to be very sex-obsessed and uses colloquial and often quite offensive language to attract a certain type of older man. (Perhaps one who is more settled in his life, wanting to recapture his rebellious youth vicariously?)

There is also more violence and it is portrayed in a certain and possibly unexpected way. Whereas Nuts limits it to one page with, ‘Look away‘ clearly written around it, Zoo boasts, ‘over 5 pages of blood.‘

In the editorial for Zoo there’s a quote, ‘We’re the only mag for blokes who like a laugh and want to see regular photos of sex between species.‘ (and yes there’s a picture of two turtles at it in one edition and an elephant and a rhino in another.)

So the language and content sums up the magazine and how each targets the reader, providing an audience for the beer, watch, toiletries and music store adverts.

TOM JENKINS 2004

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Understanding Women’s Magazines

  • How do their readers consume them?
  • What factors shape magazines?
  • Feminists see magazines as a problem; as an oppression of femininity.
  • The women’s mag industry circulates mags which promote society’s male view of what it means to be feminine.
  • Early feminism was concerned with the ‘unreal’ images of women.
  • Betty Friedan 1963 said Women’s magazines perpetuate inequalities, that they were pernicious and alienating of women from their true selves.
  • Later feminism, Janice Winship 1978, saw ideology as having a material form and magazines as an oppressive force, instruments of domination that the producers disseminated deliberately.
  • Louis Althusser (the neo-Marxist philosopher) work informed many of these studies and later it was realised that these studies saw women’s magazines as essentially closed texts that imprisoned women within a dominant set of ideologies, thus reducing the text some said to little more than an agent in the service of patriarchal capitalism.
  • Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s notions of civil society and the production of hegemony allowed women’s magazines to be conceived of as an arena of political contest rather than simply a site of ideological manipulation.
  • His view was that hegemony was a situation in which a class or faction is able to secure a moral, cultural, intellectual and therefore political leadership in society through an ongoing process of struggle and compromise. Hegemony is therefore a process not a given.
  • As such women’s mags were seen as a site where women’s oppression was debated and negotiated rather than merely reinforced.
  • Hebron and Winship: highlighted issues of inequality and offered solutions that were simplistic and concrete, but the individual was encouraged to change rather than society. Offering a ‘post-feminist’ life that could be ‘whatever you, the individual, make of it.‘ Winship 1987.
  • Hebron realised that magazines while appearing to offer help they actually blocked any perspectives deemed too radical or ‘controversial’.
  • Winship realised that the pleasure gained from these mags was not free but highly coded.
  • Other studies revealed that magazines had the potential spaces for ‘resistant’ readings but lacked the substance to effect meaningful change in either society or even the magazine genre itself!
  • Steiner‘s study of Ms. was more optimistic about its possibilities. 1991.
  • Ros Ballaster’s study concluded that readers were actually very conscious of women’s magazines as ‘bearers of particular discourses of femininity’ and many were indeed able to make a ‘critical assessment’ of the content of the magazine.
  • ‘[The] disagreement [of readers] is a response to, a reaction to, these versions [of femininity]…‘
  • Joke Hermes challenged the idea that women’s mags could somehow harm readers 1995 and found readers to be quite independent of the text employing them at particular moments in the formation of fantasy and imagined new selves; she felt they needed to be analysed in context of the readers’ everyday lives.
  • Influenced by Post-modern feminist methods, more recent accounts have delved into issues of consumption and attempted to examine the relationship between feminism, femininity and women’s magazines, exploring the extent to which they foster dominant forms of femininity among their readers.
  • Marjorie Ferguson’s 1983 study of production, consumption and the women’s press has offered the only study to date of production.
  • She argued that the relationship between women’s mags and their audiences was akin to that of the religious cults and their adherents, as outlined by Emile Durkheim. She argued that femininity can also be regarded as a ‘cult’ – a denomination in which magazines represented the holy testament.
  • For her then the editors are extremely important as custodians of the feminine cult and by setting the agenda within the magazines they were in a powerful position. The women’s mag ‘determinedly defines the female condition positively and ultimately around finding a male [and] equally determinedly defines women negatively in terms of their common oppression by men…‘
  • Although she gave only limited attention to the readers’ understanding of mags the patterns of economic ownership within the mag industry were presumed to determine fairly directly the activities of those working within it. They administered production processes in the interests of capital and any creative process was presented as a standardised, rational and thoroughly predictable process.
  • Reed’s study at Hearst magazines 1996, discovered from the position of women within the organisation that important shifts had taken place in the industry’s working practices and these had brought in turn a profound set of cultural changes within the industry and that industry concepts of their readers were also significantly modified.
  • Angela McRobbie’s study in 1996 discovered that the reader is regarded within the production as one of their own circle of friends. Market researchers also participated in this, helping to deliver the reader shaped into a concrete consumer profile. Even recruitment policies at mags ensured that the employees shared the same view as the reader, embodied the qualities of this ideal reader.
  • She also discovered that sexuality had replaced romance as the magazines’ ideological focus. In addition many new employees were uni graduates in media texts and had the same feminist world view as the readers and mags such as More! and Marie Claire thus spoke to readers about sexuality in an idiom that was ‘mocking and ironic’ thus providing a counter-hegemonic space for critical reflection and turning the tables on men who had for years scrutinise women as sexual objects within the universe of glossy magazines.
  • New women’s weekly magazines like Bella and Best, were shown to differ from the traditional ones like Woman because they offered the ‘illusion of participation’ – Oates 1999.
  • It must be remembered that the meaning of women’s magazines is not generated at the moment they are read by their audience but also at the point of production