HayeFattie flagged up the difficulty of finding examples from their genre (girl band pop: Girls Aloud), so I had a quick look online; a couple of quick tips for you all, regardless of genre, from this:
- there are plentiful completed student blogs out there with jpgs embedded...
- what you need to think about is what terms to use within google...
- keywords: obviously magazine and ad, but use mag*, ad* so you get hits from every variation of the words
- ocr, g324, a2 media coursework ... all may help
- After finding 'girl bands' didn't bring useful results, I tried 'girls aloud mag* ad*' (and then added 'cd') + same for sugababes (as sugabab* because the filter blocks 'babes'!)
- results (look at image and web) included a good many magazine covers, in this case Sugar, OK!, Cosmopolitan, Attitude (gay men's magazine), FHM and many others, including newspaper mags such as the NoTW's Fabulous (2nd eg). The first two would help to indicate likely mags to target the primary target audience in, the latter two the secondary audience (gay men: pink pound, + heterosexual young men [15-34]: male gaze)
ITS WORTH STRESSING THIS: IF THEY APPEAR ON A MAG COVER, THAT EVIDENCES THE APPEAL TO THAT MAG'S READERSHIP + THUS THEY ARE LIKELY TO CONSIDER ADVERTISING IN IT!!!
USE THE ONLINE FORUMS/FANSITES/FACEBOOK PAGES
A simple enough point: try posting in relevant forums etc with a request for any scans or other useful resources/info. Screenshot such requests and make sure you blog on this even if you don't get a response.
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| Q is comparatively gender-neutral, tho' note the Tatu strapline |
The magazine industry is heavily gendered in its structure, not least the music press.
- while there are girls mags (Sugar, Bliss et al) there aren't direct equivalent for boys (and its worth noting that the readership of girls mags is generally younger than the publishers care to admit: as the uses and gratifications theory suggests, one key reason for selecting the media we do is because it reflects the aspirational aims we hold, not least, as tweenagers especially, to be seen and treated as older; we need the surveillance such mags provide (images of makeup, fashion etc) to help with that
- boys are served with subject-specific mags such as Shoot (football), plus comics
- the music press is largely skewed towards a supposed male readership - look at the prevalence of sex hotline ads at the back, and frequency of generally sexist shots of scantily clad popettes (clearly not targetted at heterosexual female readers!)
- many female readers get their pop news not from NME, Kerrang and the likes, but the celebrity gossip + women's magazines, from OK!/Now/Heat etc to Vogue/Cosmo etc
- although it does use sexualised images of female acts, Q is as close as it gets to a mainstream gender-neutral music mag, albeit for a sophisticated aud, and mostly older than the <15-24 of Indie bible NME. The sample cover above lists Sugababes at the bottom
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| Official website, with banner ad for exclusive CD + DVD: check out your act's site for such ads |
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| Think carefully about representations + how this reflects the audience... |
HayeFattie flagged up the difficulty of finding examples from their genre (girl band pop: Girls Aloud), so I had a quick look online; a couple of quick tips for you all, regardless of genre, from this:
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