Advertising is the promotion of a production to encourage and persuade a target audience to buy or use a product or service. Advertisements are the most common source of promotion; we see it on television, the internet, posters, magazines and all around us. Magazine adverts are pages that contain no oral speech or movement instead they contain pictures and text. The advantages of having advertising in magazines are that you can take as long as you want to read it or look at it. Another advantage is that the promoter can choose what kind of audience will see the advert by placing adverts in magazines that suit their target audience. However magazine adverts also carry their disadvantages; people can ignore it easily, it is limited to pictures and text and people might skip it unintentionally.
I have selected two magazine adverts for analysis. The first advert is advertising ‘Pocket music’ a game for game boy advance and the second advert is advertising an ‘MGF 1.8i’ a sports car manufactured by ‘MG’ which is taken from ‘FHM’. The pocket music advert was taken from ‘Computer and video games magazine’ the target audience for this magazine is slightly younger at about 12+ male and female. This advert promotes a game that allows you to ‘make music on the move.’ The product is quite important in today’s society because computer games are getting very popular and common.
The ‘MGF’ advert was taken from ‘FHM’ which is a magazine popular with males over 16. The advert promotes a sports car and emphasises that it can switch between manual and automatic to suit you. It is quite important in today’s society because cars are something used pretty often and style and speed are values that people like in cars. I know that ‘MG’ is quite a posh, good quality car manufacturer that makes a wide range of sport cars.
I think the target audience for pocket ‘music’ is 12-16 because the advert contains a mobile phone theme due to how the language and font is showed and because mobile phones are popular with teenagers I chose it. Another reason is because the console used for playing the game is aimed at people around that age. The target audience for the advert is someone who might like music because of the headphones that appear on the ‘game boy advance’ picture shown in the advert and because of some faint words in the background that are connected to music: i.e. “hip hop” and “big-beat”.
The car advert is probably aimed at 17-50 but would be more popular in the younger generation because the style is clear to see and the advert states that it has a six speed manual gearbox. These factors are common in younger drivers. The ‘pocket music’ advert grabbed my attention by its bright complex background and the big picture in the centre that made me read on to see in detail what it was trying to show. It holds my attention by making me want to know more about it due to the interesting picture.
The second advert grabbed my attention because it was on a double page which makes it bigger and the only thing in the magazine you can see. It also grabbed my attention because everything was reflected and repeated upside down which not only attracted me visually but also made me want to find out why. The 2 adverts are quite different to each other; the pocket music advert is contrasting, sophisticated, bright, colourful and complex while the ‘MGF’ advert is darkish, simple and basically contains no colour.
The products are very different as well but the images both take part in what the product does; the car is reflected to show it does two things and the ‘pocket music’ advert shows a game boy with headphones placed over it which shows you can involve music with your ‘game boy’. They both show and hint what the product does. The text both contain what the product can do but the style of language is different. The ‘pocket music’ advert has a kind of exciting feel to it because of its bright complex background and it also makes it look full of fun and makes it look like it has a lot of depth. The ‘MGF’ advert is quite different to this because it is quite dark, plain and simple. It gives the feeling of quality, power and desire.
