Men's Men and Women's Women
Men’s Men and Women’s Women
-Steve Craig
Medha Aravind
Essay 2
355:101:02
Professor Zeuguin
Large advertising agencies have evolved pseudo-scientific methods through experience, research and intuition that yield a demographic profile of the target audience, who are the most important predictors of purchasing behavior.
Advertisers carefully craft their ads to appeal to male and female consumers, respectively.
For example, advertisers use the daytime to reach women who work at home while prime time is used to reach women who commute to work daily and weekend sports periods are optimum time for advertising products and services aimed at men.
Steve Craig in “Men’s Men and Women’s Women”, claims that just as programming manipulates gender portrayals, commercials should manipulate too, to pleasure the target audience by associating the product with a pleasurable experience and that this depends on how the commercials portray men and women to themselves and the other sex.
Steve Craig uses the example of an automobile commercial to show how men are portrayed to other men in advertisements. 29% of the commercials aired during weekend sports periods are for automobiles as men as seen as the primary decision makers for purchases from the automobile industry.
Commercials for automobiles usually involve camaraderie in all male or nearly all male groupings. This escapism and male camaraderie is an extension of the same that men enjoy when they watch weekend sports on television as it offers them a chance to escape from the growing ambiguity of masculinity in everyday life. Thus, the commercial reinforces male fantasies of clear masculinity and male domination.
The presence of the single women in the ad serves to stop the confusion of any signs of homosexuality because the woman appears as an anonymous object of desire.
The men’s men therefore, have the unchallenged freedom of a fantasized masculinity, i.e to travel, to be free from
-Steve Craig
Medha Aravind
Essay 2
355:101:02
Professor Zeuguin
Large advertising agencies have evolved pseudo-scientific methods through experience, research and intuition that yield a demographic profile of the target audience, who are the most important predictors of purchasing behavior.
Advertisers carefully craft their ads to appeal to male and female consumers, respectively.
For example, advertisers use the daytime to reach women who work at home while prime time is used to reach women who commute to work daily and weekend sports periods are optimum time for advertising products and services aimed at men.
Steve Craig in “Men’s Men and Women’s Women”, claims that just as programming manipulates gender portrayals, commercials should manipulate too, to pleasure the target audience by associating the product with a pleasurable experience and that this depends on how the commercials portray men and women to themselves and the other sex.
Steve Craig uses the example of an automobile commercial to show how men are portrayed to other men in advertisements. 29% of the commercials aired during weekend sports periods are for automobiles as men as seen as the primary decision makers for purchases from the automobile industry.
Commercials for automobiles usually involve camaraderie in all male or nearly all male groupings. This escapism and male camaraderie is an extension of the same that men enjoy when they watch weekend sports on television as it offers them a chance to escape from the growing ambiguity of masculinity in everyday life. Thus, the commercial reinforces male fantasies of clear masculinity and male domination.
The presence of the single women in the ad serves to stop the confusion of any signs of homosexuality because the woman appears as an anonymous object of desire.
The men’s men therefore, have the unchallenged freedom of a fantasized masculinity, i.e to travel, to be free from