There are two broad types of audience question:
- How does the producer target/position the audience?
Explore the ways that Adbusters and Woman target their audiences through content and appeal...
"another way Adbusters targets their audience is through..."
Uses and gratification Theory:
- We can all get uses and pleasure from media products, but not everybody who uses these media products gets the same uses and pleasure out of them; everyone is different.
Social interaction, we don't just watch and listen to stuff; we discuss it with others after, can be useful in meeting new people by making assumptions of others just by what they watch, listen, etc.
Fandoms, they're beyond normal audiences. they tend to dress up as their favourite characters from typically sci-fi genres.
Educational purposes, documentaries made by David Attenborough teach people about things we wouldn't normally know. information can't always be good though.
People you can relate to, make you feel like you can fit in to; personal relations. products will often advertise themselves based on who they're advertising to, being appealing to the target audience. Escapism, saying our lives are boring and that we need the media to escape our everyday lives. Voyeurism, looking into someone's life; even though it's illegal.
Sexual gratification, following someone on instagram, buying an album, watching a film simply because you find them attractive.
The target audience for this advert would primarily be females between 25-50 years old, working class who are most likely housewives, heterosexual. The image, which takes up two thirds of the whole advert uses a naked young woman, physically attractive which makes it aspirational to women. looking at the advert as it would be selling them a lifestyle instead of the actual product, however those looking at the advert won't be stupid enough to think you'd become like the woman in the advert. the advert itself heavily sexualises the female model, we know sex sells products. It promotes an unrealistic idea of what beauty is as she's washing with a full face of makeup and messy hair with it still looking attractive. It's a hegemonic attractive young woman instead of using an older woman with more realism which would depress the reader's into buying the product, being guilt tripped into spending money. The lexis is calm and smooth which reinforces the mise-en-scene of the soap. The advert is missing the bath simply so we can see her body, which shows the sexualisation of the advert. The advert can provoke discussions from the audience, talking about how it's the ideal body, to the further talk about the soap itself. "Because you're a woman" reinforces that this is an aspiration through the direct mode of address which makes it relatable to the audience who is assumed to be fully made of women.
Key Theory 17 - Reception - Stuart Hall:
- When the producer encodes the media product with something for the audience to decode, with possibly a variety of meanings.
There are 3 different ways in which we can respond to a product:
Preferred - Agree with the ideology
Oppositional - Disagree with the ideology; hate the good guy, etc
Negotiated - Somethings we agree with, others we disagree with
The ideology of the producer from the advert is that we take things we consider as normal like shoes, for granted. Because of how the image uses a person from which we can assume is from Africa has made shoes out of two empty plastic bottles. It also might make you feel upset or angry because of the lexis "red soles are always in season" because of how their feet must be sore and damaged through not having proper shoes, having to make do with what they have, making all African people poor. Adbusters is polysemic, meaning it has multiple meanings, while some people are spending hundreds on high end clothing, others are making do with what they have, emphasising global inequality. The preferred reading is that consumerism, capitalism and adverts is bad. Simply it's just using a stereotype to make it easier to understand it as the audience. The negotiated reading might be that you like Loubouton so you might be offended by how Adbusters have used the brand, but you may understand the criticism of poverty. The aberrant reading is that people may feel the advert is real and that they want to buy the bottle shoes.
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