Andrea Harmon
Race, gender & Media
12/7/07
Race in advertising

When looking through ads in two magazines I found that most of the people pictured in them were white males. The other big percentage of people pictured were black males who are famous.
The previous study by Dana E. Mastro and Susannah R. Stern (“Race and Gender in Advertising: A Look at Sexualized Images in Prime-Time Commercials,” 2006, Sex in Consumer Culture) reveals that the race of characters has little to do with how they are represented sexually during a comparison of television commercial of a 3 week sample from February 2001. In this study of six major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, UPN, and WB) males and females were represented equally across races, but did find that Latinos were most always portrayed as sexualized.
The most relevant study used by the previous study is the work by Wilson & Gutierrez (“Race, multiculturalism, and mass media: From mass to class communications,” 1995), which found that when minorities were found in advertising, they were ‘limited in number and narrow in scope.’ This earlier study, upon which Mastro & Stern’s study is based, found that images of African Americans in advertising were scarce and often unfavorable, and despite the growth of African Americans in ads, they were often represented as servants and entertainers.
Corpus and method:
My corpus comprises all full-page ads, appearing in the March 2007, issue of DETAILS Magazine and the Feb. 8, 2007, issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. The method is a quantitative and qualitative content analysis, in which all characters in each ad was coded first as black, white or other, coded for male or female, and then was coded for their role in the advertisement.
Findings:
Rolling Stone Magazine included 17 depictions of characters in full-pages ads: 10 of white males, 5 of white females, 1 of a black male and 1 of a black female. Most characters take on various roles, however; the one black male is a basketball star and the one black female was used for her stereotypically large hair. There was a purpose for these two black characters, they weren’t just everyday roles. In DETAILS Magazine included 133 characters in full-page ads: 109 of white males, 15 white females, 8 black males, and 1 black female. Two out of the three black males in the magazine ads were famous characters, Tiger Woods and Jay Z. The other black male was in a smoking advertisement.
Conclusions:
This mini-study matches many studies of the past which have shown many more white males popping up in ads than any other race or gender. When black characters are shown in these ads they have specific roles that are taken on because of their profession or for stereotyping purposes. From the two magazines studied there were 11 blacks out of 150 characters. Of those 11 characters 9 were celebrities, 1 was used in a Versa ad for her stereotypically large hair and one was used to sell the nasty habit of smoking. There weren’t any typical roles, such as sitting in an office, modeling clothes, or using a toothbrush, that were played by a non-white character. Also, white men were mostly pictured in groups. These groups of white males were usually hugging or playfully pushing each other around. White woman were pictured more than black male or females, but still not as much as white males.
A larger study of full-page print ads for these magazines could be attempted to see if these pattern continues. The study could go a little further by seeing what direction the character’s eyes are facing. Is the character looking at the camera, to the side or at another character? Does the direction the eyes are facing say something about the role they are playing? The study could also count how many times white males are put in groups compared to any other race or gender. The larger study should also include more magazines from the different issues.