Male gender portrayal in modern advertising

Résumé du document

Since advertising reaches thousands of individuals daily, it has become a target for a lot of scrutiny by researchers interested in the consequences of advertising on culture and society. These studies concern above all the role advertising plays in gender stereotyping. The portrayal of gender in advertising particularly that of women, has received considerable attention over the few last decades. Indeed, advertising has been accused by feminists and critical marketing thinkers of stereotyping images of women in confining them to traditional or sex oriented roles. However, gender stereotyping does not only target women as nowadays, men seem to be more and more portrayed by advertisers in stereotypical ways, which can be explained by the increasing role of men in consumption. The emergence of men as consumers is now obvious. Men are now as much a part of modern consumerism as women. Traditionally, women were characterized as spending money rather than earning it.

Extraits

[...] After that, we had to define a coding procedure in order to organize the observation of advertisements on television. The advertisements were examined using the process of content analysis, research technique for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication” (Berelson and Bernard, as cited by Whitelock and Jackson, 1997:298), as in a lot of previous studies on that same topic. We created an observation sheet (in appendix) in order to make easier the observation. These variables were coded for each main adult character (and only one) that appeared in advertisements on-screen. [...]

[...] As there are more and more channels and broadcasters (satellite, cable, Digital Terrestrial Television), market share of older channels such as BBC1 or STV are slightly decreasing. Thus, we widened the number of channel studied in order to cover more advertisements broadcasted. Moreover, it has helped the survey to be more representative as we did not only focus on generalist channels (BBC1, BBC2, Channel etc.), but also on channels with feminine prevalence (Living masculine prevalence (Bravo), or targeting young individuals Trouble, etc.).Advertisements used for the survey were broadcasted during evening prime time (from 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm) between the 11 and 15 of December. [...]

[...] Setting/location: Men were expected to be more portrayed outside than women. Other observations: that variable was created for additional information who seemed to be important for the analysis. Findings Our final sample was actually composed of 50 advertisements as forecasted. Then, in order to simplify the results, we decided to organise the 11 variables observed in 7 analysis categories. It has been observed that 31 of the advertisements were using male gender and 19 female gender as a central character. [...]

[...] Secondly, the Breadwinner is linked with the family man. His image usually shows the man as controlling either a child or a woman. He is often in the background, as if he was protecting them or watching them. Finally, the man as a joker is also very popular in advertising, often portrayed in a amusing way. All these stereotypical men have to evolve in different environments. The first one is man world', which is defined by the relationship between men themselves. [...]

[...] Gender Advertisements, London. Humberto Gastélum, Carlos (2005). Portrayal of men in Canadian television advertising, Revista mexicana de estudios canadienses. Jackson, D. and Whitelock, J. (1997). Women in TV advertising: a comparison between the UK and France, European Business Review, 294-305. Kaufman, Gayle (1999). The Portrayal of Men's Family Roles in Television Commercials, Sex Roles: A Journal of Research. [...]