Do you think that advertisers make decisions based on solid research?

-Ever since Ladies Magazine debuted in Boston in 1828, editorial copy directed to women has been informed by something other than its reader's wishes.

There were no ads then, but in an age when married women were legal minors with no right to their own money, there was another venue source to be kept in mind: husbands.
husbands may rest assured that nothing found in these pages shall cause his wife to be less assiduous in preparing for his reception or encourage her to usurp-station or encroach upon prerogative of men.

Most women's magazines avoid politics & rarely take a stand & praise socially approved lifestyles.

Avoid the hot topics of its day: slavery abolition, and women's suffrage.

By the time suffragists finally won the vote in 1930, women's magazines had become too entranced as catalogues, with main function to create a desire for products, teach how to use products, and make products a crucial part of gaining social approval, pleasing a husband & performing as a homemaker.

The male-imitative, dress-for-success woman carrying a briefcase became the media image of a woman worker, even though a blue collar woman's salary was often higher than her glorified secretarial sister's & though women at a real briefcase level are statistically rare. Needless to say, these dress-for-success women were also thin, white and beautiful.

Following are recent typical orders to women magazines:

• Clairol stipulates that ads be placed next to a full page of compatible editorial
• The De Beers diamond company, a big seller of engagement rings, prohibits magazines from placing its ads next to hard news or anti love/romance themed editorial
• Procter & Gamble ads were not to be placed in any issue that included any material on gun control, abortion, the occult, cults or the disparagement of religion. Any issue covering sex or drugs, even for educational purposes.

These claims lead to an overall look of beauty & fashion in magazines where women are made up, dressed, retouched. Article on less-than-cheerful topics tend to be short & unillustrated.

Point is to be upbeat

Often editorial becomes one giant ad. When revlon was not placed as the first beauty ad in one Hearst magazine, Revlon pulled its ads from all Hearst magazines.

Advertisers want to know two things.
-What you are going to charge me?
-What else are you going to do for me?

More magazines are more bottom-line oriented because they have been taken over by companies with no interest in publishing. I also think advertisers do this to women's magazines especially because of the general disrespect they have for women.

• Vanity fair published a profile on one major advertiser, Ralph Lauren, illustrated by the same photographer who does his ads, and turned the lifestyle of another, Calvin Klein, into a cover story.

  
  

• Films & books, producers are beginning to depend on payments for displaying products in movies and books are now being commissioned by companies like Federal Express.