ejs 2004

ejs

Volume 4

GENDER AND TELEVISION ADVERTISEMENTS:

A CONTENT ANALYSIS

Justin Storer

Many Americans were offended by something that they saw while watching the Super Bowl this year. It was unexpected, it was tacky, and (while few are advocating outright censorship) some people believe that it simply should not have happened.

No, it wasn’t the Justin Timberlake/Janet Jackson debacle, it was a beer commercial. Therein, a football referee gets berated by a coach. The coach loudly screams, right into the referee’s ear, about what a bad call he (the ref) just made. The referee stands, stoic, unmoved, as the fictive game’s announcers muse: “How can he take all that abuse?” Cut to the referee, at home now, sitting on the couch. His wife is screaming into his ear about what a bad husband he is, in the same manner the coach was screaming. The referee continues to stare blankly ahead. Women, thus, are presented as domineering and fundamentally counter to men (as the coach was, so is the wife). Seeing things like this commercial motivated this research project. In this study, I will perform a content analysis to better understand how messages in commercials relate to the television networks where they are presented.

Would the Super Bowl present more ads like the above than the Oxygen network? What about Spike TV, “the first network for men,” as opposed to a block of daytime TV? Further, what about the Bravo network, catering to upper-class whites, as opposed to Black Entertainment Television? Would the commercials presented be different? Finally, if there is a difference in quantity - or if there isn’t - what does that signify for the culture at large?

THEORETICAL PERSEPCTIVE

This research is grounded in radical and socialist feminist theory. Radical feminism highlights the fact that, in a patriarchal system, women are and have been oppressed by men, and the only solution is to completely uproot the system (Burgess-Jackson, 1995). From this perspective, men have written the rules by which all must live, and by not being men, women are one of society’s underclasses.

Radical feminist theory maintains that drastic change is required in the framework of life, including the media. Form this perspective, advertising is yet another means by which men dominate women, as non-males are still not given equal regard in the advertisements that we see every day. Even if a woman conceptualized and produced an advertisement, it must still be vetted and rated by men - or, alternately (in the case of a focus group, for example), by women are conditioned to see themselves as somehow less. Hence, this research attempts to study those advertisements that might contribute to this problem.

From a socialist feminist perspective, a main issue is capitalist gain. Women’s self-images are playthings, manipulated to sell more cosmetics, clothes, and consumer goods (Craig, 1998). Capitalist gain and patriarchy are mutually dependent, while not necessarily overlapping, either (Eisenstein, 1999). Consolidating radical and socialist feminism yields a viewpoint in which both genders are trapped in “a circuit of envy and desire” (Goldman, Heath and Smith, 1991). The socialist viewpoint understands that the problem transcends gender into being a matter of class as well: Advertising attempts to coerce the viewer into a state of subservience so that the viewer will go out and shop. Advertising thus commodifies those who watch it, and it follows logically that this process will be undertaken by means of cliché and stereotype such as presentations of ideal men and women on one hand, and mockeries of those who defy on the other. The question then becomes apparent: How do various networks demonstrate this manipulation? Would they all take the same or different approaches?

METHODOLOGY

Content analysis is a qualitative or quantitative system whereby coders view texts (in this case, television commercials) and, striving to be as objective as possible, tally up the number of instances of certain behaviors (e.g., women seen nagging or otherwise annoying men). This method offers the opportunity to observe qualities in texts that one might initially neglect to see; thus, the research process can adapt to the data as it emerges.

The material analyzed consists of six two-hour blocks of television, selected by both convenience and purposive sampling. The sample, which was drawn in the spring of 2004, included: (1) Two hours of the Super Bowl (a massive cultural event like none other in the year), (2) two hours of daytime television (“fluff” news shows, game shows, and soap operas), (3) two hours of Spike TV (specializing in programming geared towards the stereotypical man, who enjoys violence, beer, and laughing at other cultures), (4) two hours of the Oxygen network (specializing in programming towards women’s interests and empowerment), (5) two hours of the Bravo Network (left-leaning politically, and virtually all white racially), and (6) two hours of Black Entertainment Television (primarily news and music videos geared towards African Americans).

I analyzed twelve hours of television. Commercials make up only a third or fourth of that time. The possible repetition of commercials over this two-hour block is methodologically acceptable, as the practice known as “sampling without replacement” was used in deference to the fact that repetition of a commercial will only intensify its message (Neuendorf, 2002: 84).

The code sheet for the analysis is organized around four major traits of commercials for both women and men: (1) people being seen as eroticized sex objects, (2) people being seen as caretakers, (3) people being seen as inconvenient/nagging/mettlesome, and (4) people being seen as materialistic. To analyze another gender dynamic, I also coded the adoption of the values of another sex. Overall, these sorts of presentations will be referred to as stereotyping, given that the actors in commercials are adopting predefined roles, rather than unique expressions of self. It is understood that the coding systems I’ve devised are necessarily incomplete

LITERATURE REVIEW

Gender has been an integral part of media studies throughout their history, and many content analyses have been conducted on the matter (Davis 2003). Those pioneering efforts showed a “limited evidence” of stereotyping (Courtney and Whipple, 1983: 57). However, since then, the existence, depth and breadth, along with the actual significance of stereotyping in advertisements, has been up to a great measure of debate. In this field of study, contradictory results are prevalent, contingent on the manner in which the study has been operationalized. One study found that national television ads during sporting events are more likely to both show males and grant males a greater number of speaking roles (Riffe, Place, and Mayo, 1993). This study goes on to discuss how, during sporting events, women in advertising were, on average, no more provocatively dressed or sexualized than men.

Another study researching targeted advertising to particular demographic groups studied all commercials aired on the show Ally McBeal during its five year run. Profound stereotyping was discovered. The show focused on an idealized-yet-flighty young woman trying to make it in a man’s world, and the commercials presented themes remarkably similar to the show’s plot. The two most prevalent themes in commercials during Ally McBeal were (a) idealized presentations of women as being thin, powerful, intelligent and exactly the same as all other women, and (b) fantasy fulfillment, wherein all earthly problems are solved by some commodity (Crouse-Dick 2002).

Advertising on children’s programs fares no better. During after-school and Saturday morning programming, male actors appear more frequently outside the home, and traditional gender stereotyping was present throughout (Smith, 1994). Furthermore, for children’s commercials, a male was more likely to take the primary role in the commercial (or even just a more physically active one), or be in an occupational setting (Davis 2003). Larson (2001) found that girls on children’s television advertising were most often found in domestic settings, although there was a roughly equal number of boys and girls shown through the sum of the advertisements.

Research has found that commercials on MTV are heavily stereotyped, just as the videos are. Females appeared less frequently than males, were more eroticized and generally better looking. They were often used as objects of attention for male characters (Signorielli and McLeod, 1994). Insofar as erotic/sexualized behavior is concerned, however, the findings seem to indicate that, on most networks, there is not a great deal present; nor is there a difference in quality by gender. Between males and females, there is roughly an equal amount of physical innuendo, verbal innuendo, and physical contact (Lin, 1998). However, this study contradicts that of Place, et al., and indicates that females are more likely than men to be shown as sexually attractive people, and men were more likely to be fully clothed when compared to their female counterparts.

Cross-cultural studies of gender in advertising utilizing content analysis are surprisingly common. Acting upon the hypothesis that France would have a greater degree of stereotyping than the United Kingdom and Italy because it has a “more masculine” culture, researchers found that, in part, stereotyping in France was similar to that in other parts of Europe (Furnham, Babitzkow, and Uguccioni, 2000). Predictions were again contravened in a similar study comparing the United Kingdom and New Zealand, in which it was found that New Zealand had more sex-role stereotyping than did the United Kingdom (Furnham and Farrager, 2000).

THE CODING

This all established, it came time to sit down and actually work out the logistics of the content analysis. I would need to decide when to do it, with whom to do it, and how to teach my co-coder. If I enlisted the help of a male to do something, he might have the same perspective as I would, and thus neglect aspects of commercials that a woman would be likelier to see. So, I asked a female friend of mine to help me out. I explained the purpose and told her that she should simply record her impressions. She should not think excessively, should not analyze or qualify excessively. She should simply record what she feels the commercial portrays.

We decided to record all our two-hour blocks of television, over successive nights. With the exception of the Super Bowl, which aired the first of February, and the “daytime TV” portion of our sample, we did all our recording from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., Central time, over successive nights in the middle of March. We did this to preemptively avoid an argument. While the original plan was to record everything over one day, just for convenience’s sake, the argument could be made that commercial programming in the daytime, evening and afternoon would be different, based upon stereotypical demographics - women would most likely be home in the daytime, men in the evening, etc. The flipside to this argument is that perhaps the rise in “narrowcasting” (which this content analysis is, in a very indirect fashion, studying) would predicate against this development. Narrowcasting is a system wherein networks are no longer produced for mass numbers of people, but rather small and specifically targeted demographic groups - the Oxygen Network, for the sake of example, is not geared towards everybody: It’s designed for women. To which the opposing argument could be made that there are going to be women who work and women who do not, with commercials still tailored to each need depending on the day. The decision was made, then, to circumvent that whole issue. Research has found, however, that time of day is a variable virtually impossible to take into consideration (Furnham et. al, 2000).

And so we set to the coding process. We realized quickly that some of the categories had to be modified. When a character engages in typical contact sports behavior (playing football, for example; hurting others for personal glory) or violence against another person, we folded that into the “inconvenient/nagging/mettlesome” category, for the sake of the deductive numbering. This applied to both genders roughly equally. When someone is shown being excessively concerned with their own physical image, we saw it as being a form of materialism.

Also worth noting, by way of prelude to the results, is that commercials in the Chicago metro region (where I watched them) are different than those in the St. Louis area (were I currently live). While most are exactly the same, certain businesses have presences in one, but not the other. St. Louis does not get Empire Carpet commercials; Chicago does not get Jack In the Box. This highlights what would be another difficulty in obtaining any sort of generalizability, were this to be a straightforward deductive research project.

THE QUANTITATIVE RESULTS

My female coder actually saw less stereotyping in commercials than I did. For example, she did not see a Bally’s Total Fitness gym commercial (presenting traditionally attractive young women wearing skimpy workout clothes) as an issue of sexual exploitation, but rather merely a presentation of females being, as defined above, materialistic. I saw it as both. The fact remains, however, that intercoder reliability was high, with great overlap - in the deductive aspect of the coding - extending to over 90% of the commercials watched. This reaffirms the virtue of multiple coders. The actual numbers that my co-coder and I returned are appended.

Overall, the network with the highest percentages of “stereotyping” commercials was Spike TV, which paints both men and women with broad, archetypical strokes. The lowest was found on daytime television and the Super Bowl, the two programming blocks without vested interest in the narrowcasting phenomenon discussed earlier. The most profound differences are manifested in the gendered breakdowns of the commercials. The Super Bowl and Spike TV each only had a single commercial with just women - and whether or not this commercial counts, or is another example of both genders being present, is up to debate.Jessica Simpson was the woman, except she shared the commercial with a sexually diverse group of Muppets. Lerner and Kalof (1999), in discussing anthropomorphism, note that oftentimes nonhuman characters displaying human personality traits (as is the case with the Muppets) fall into typically gendered patterns of behavior. Such being the case, an argument could be made that, insofar as the Super Bowl and Spike TV are concerned, no commercials contained exclusively women.

Daytime television, Oxygen, and Bravo had the highest number of exclusively female commercials. They also had the lowest percentage of commercials with exclusively men, although Bravo’s percentage is still quite high. Daytime television and the Oxygen network (traditionally presented for women) had the lowest percentages of commercials with exclusively men. These same two networks also had the highest percentages of commercials with both men and women, together. In these commercials, with rare exceptions, the male and female characters are fundamentally getting along. One example (aired on both of these networks) of this contained no dialogue, except for a voiceover discussing fabulous bargains available, given that a certain Bay Furniture location is closing its doors forever. Ethnically diverse heterosexual couples milled throughout the store. One would notice a piece of furniture, point it out to the other, who would evince great happiness with his or her partner’s selection. This may be a tacit statement helping define the ideal relationship as one without disagreement but with a great deal of shopping. This bears similarities to Crouse-Dick’s Ally McBeal study, which highlighted how those commercials defined the ideal woman as “sexy, intelligent, and powerful” (Crouse-Dick, 2002). If the media has a genuine vested interest in framing women a certain way, it would not be surprising for the media to attempt, similarly, to frame relationships.

All networks displayed very little of the behavior we’ve called “men as nagging,” none doing so in more than twelve percent of commercials, except for Bravo - in which over one-fourth of commercials showed men as being helpless, angry, violent and/or emotionally immature. This was evinced most often in promotional ads (which were very prevalent) for a new show on the network, called “Significant Others.”

The Super Bowl was the only programming block wherein a double-digit percentage of women acted like men. However, men acted like women the most on Spike TV, Bravo, and daytime television, a grouping not seen anywhere else. No overarching theory explain this grouping: There is no overlap in targeted demographics between these three programming blocks. On Spike TV the men who were acting feminine were doing it so the viewer would mock them. On Bravo, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” can account for some of the tally, but a comparatively small number of ads (four) for that program were on. And on daytime television, men acted like women as a matter of wish-fulfillment for women. Three different reasons were found for the same phenomenon, which was (on all three networks) manifested in different commercials for different products or services. This could signify is the distinct possibility that no generalizable conclusions can be drawn from this research, although one factor powerfully skewing the numbers will be discussed below.

QUALITATIVE RESULT NUMBER 1: CAUCASIAN MEN AS CARETAKERS ON B.E.T.

Given, as already mentioned, the great abundance of female sexuality in commercials on MTV (Signorielli, 1994), we expected to find a similar sort of predominance on Black Entertainment Television. B.E.T. primarily shows music videos, after all. However (as the numbers indicate in Appendix A) something quite different emerged: Of our six studied programming blocks, B.E.T. actually had the lowest rate of female sexual exploitation and eroticized behavior.

The trade-off occurred in the category classified as “males as caretakers.” All twelve of the commercials B.E.T. presented in that category adhere to this fact: Commercials for debt consolidation, instant credit, and car title loans leave little room for females to be sexually exploited, but what they do allow for is commercials presenting people lamenting their money woes, followed by a male discussing how his company can help. While the financially beleaguered are fairly heterogeneous - all races, ethnicities and genders are represented equally - the man who emerges (be he on camera or in voiceover) to solve their problems is always quite clearly Caucasian.

A search of the literature reveals little insight. One of the very few articles that dealt with the black-versus-white dichotomy in advertising discussed the fact that whites are often shown in advertisements for upscale products, beauty products, and products for the home, whereas African Americans are shown in commercials for fast food, soft drinks, and sports gear (Jacobs Henderson & Baldasty, 2003). A miniscule article in Newsweek discussed the complete inverse phenomenon in the world of film. In the article, African American characters in film are cited for helping lead the Caucasians to their happy ending. However, the African Americans were merely “means to an end--means to the white characters' salvation--and not ends in themselves” (Begun, Meadows, Howards and Stroop, 2000). That small article, not even from a scholarly source, is one of the only other places where the question is even broached. Further research must be done relating to commercial portrayals of Caucasian hegemony in African-American communities.

One final note bears mention, however. Earlier I mentioned the differences in commercial programming depending on geographic area; Chicago versus St. Louis. Having returned to the St. Louis metro area, I was with some friends watching UPN one night. The coding had been completed by this point. While with my friends, I saw a commercial similar to those already indicted: A diverse group of people discussed their financial problems. Rather than a Caucasian man emerging to discuss how his debt-consolidation corporation could change their lives, however, an African American woman came onscreen to make the pitch. This makes one wonder if a fulfilling study could be done comparing portrayals of race and gender across different television markets within the United States.

QUALITATIVE RESULT NUMBER 2: STARSKY AND HUTCH AND SAMPLING WITHOUT REPLACEMENT

As previously indicated, with the exception of the Super Bowl, everything that we studied was done in the middle of March 2004. During this time, an enormous advertising blitz was underway for a comedy movie, Starsky and Hutch. It featured most prominently in advertising on Oxygen, Spike TV, and Bravo. There were only three different commercials for the movie, and all the aforesaid networks showed each at least once.

All advertisements for the movie contained the following elements as they reflect on the deductive aspect of my study: (a) both males and females, (b) women being displayed or discussed as sex objects by Huggy Bear, a pimp, (c) men being materialistic (taking undue concern with physical appearance and that of their car), (d) men adopting stereotypically feminine patterns of behavior (the movie’s homoerotic overtones are hinted at in the commercials). As such, the numbers must be understood as being directly influenced by that movie. The percentages I derived quantitatively would be entirely different if the studio wanted to make Starsky and Hutch into a summer blockbuster rather than a springtime romp. This reflects very negatively on the practice of sampling without replacement (as did, on Bravo, the numbers for “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”). It indicates a lack of generalizability - because Starsky and Hutch was coming out, the numbers were entirely skewed, and the odds are that much lower that this research reflects any real trends in America’s relationship with gender and advertising.

Theoretically, the argument could be made that, given the advertising industry’s vested interest in reifying its consumers, the numbers would not be impacted in a practical way. Were Starsky and Hutch not being advertised, something different would have been presented which would have had the same effects. From a radical feminist perspective, the fact remains that, even though Starsky and Hutch would not show up quite so prominently in the research, the system still remains as it is. The only way, it seems, to obviate (what might casually be termed) the Starsky and Hutch phenomenon is to use a longitudinal research design, wherein research is conducted over at least two points in time (Peterson 1993). Validation for this idea comes from Trousdale and McMillan (2003), who analyzed interviews with a single girl (hence, they performed sampling without replacement) in regards to feminist presentation in children’s fairy tales. They did it over a four-year span, so that a balanced picture of their research subject could be gleaned, exclusive of any biasing factors occurring during a specific time. Overall, however, this is another issue necessitating further studies.

To conclude, this study of gender stereotyping in commercials revealed numerous questions about all aspects of advertising. This highlights the fact that research is not performed in a vacuum: As socialist feminism sees relationships between race and gender, to that must be added race, age, and a whole host of other considerations that this particular project did not have the good fortune to address.

APPENDIX A: THE NUMBERS

THE SUPER BOWL

TOTAL NUMBER OF COMMERCIALS - 129

Exclusively men: 52 (40.63% of commercials)

Exclusively women: 1 (.8%)

Mixed: 76 (58.91%)

Women as sex objects: 40 (31.01%)

Women as materialistic: 12 (9.30%)

Women as nagging: 15 (11.63%)

Women as caretakers: 17 (13.18%)

Men as sex objects: 8 (6.20%)

Men as materialistic: 19 (14.73%)

Men as nagging: 10 (7.75%)

Men as caretakers: 13 (10.08%)

Women acting like men: 17 (13.18%)

Men acting like women: 18 (13.95%)

DAYTIME TV

TOTAL NUMBER OF COMMERCIALS - 83

Exclusively men: 8 (9.64%)

Exclusively women: 11 (13.25%)

Mixed: 64 (77.11%)

Women as sex objects: 12 (14.46%)

Women as materialistic: 19 (22.89%)

Women as nagging: 7 (8.43%)

Women as caretakers: 33 (39.76%)

Men as sex objects: 5 (6.02%)

Men as materialistic: 14 (16.87%)

Men as nagging: 9 (10.84%)

Men as caretakers: 29 (34.94%)

Women acting like men: 5 (6.02%)

Men acting like women: 15 (18.07%)

SPIKE TV

TOTAL NUMBER OF COMMERCIALS - 103

Exclusively men: 40 (38.83%)

Exclusively women: 1 (0.97%)

Mixed: 62 (60.19%)

Women as sex objects: 32 (31.07%)

Women as materialistic: 21 (20.39%)

Women as nagging: 3 (2.91%)

Women as caretakers: 13 (12.62%)

Men as sex objects: 25 (24.27%)

Men as materialistic: 32 (31.07%)

Men as nagging: 12 (11.65%)

Men as caretakers: 19 (18.45%)

Women acting like men: 2 (1.94%)

Men acting like women: 22 (21.36%)

THE OXYGEN NETWORK

TOTAL NUMBER OF COMMERCIALS - 77

Exclusively men: 8 (10.39%)jrs

Exclusively women: 15 (19.48%)

Mixed: 54 (70.13%)

Women as sex objects: 18 (23.38%)

Women as materialistic: 15 (19.48%)

Women as nagging: 10 (12.99%)

Women as caretakers: 8 (10.39%)

Men as sex objects: 11 (14.29%)

Men as materialistic: 0 (0.00%)

Men as nagging: 3 (3.90%)

Men as caretakers: 10 (12.99%)

Women acting like men: 1 (1.30%)

Men acting like women: 4 (5.19%)

BRAVO

TOTAL NUMBER OF COMMERCIALS - 86

Exclusively men: 29 (33.72%)

Exclusively women: 18 (20.93%)

Mixed: 39 (45.34%)

Women as sex objects: 13 (15.12%)

Women as materialistic: 12 (13.95%)

Women as nagging: 15 (17.44%)

Women as caretakers: 14 (16.28%)

Men as sex objects: 9 (10.47%)

Men as materialistic: 22 (25.58%)

Men as nagging: 22 (25.58%)

Men as caretakers: 20 (23.26%)

Women acting like men: 7 (8.14%)

Men acting like women: 18 (20.93%)

B.E.T.

TOTAL NUMBER OF COMMERCIALS - 97

Exclusively men: 41 (42.27%)

Exclusively women: 5 (5.15%)

Mixed: 51 (52.58%)

Women as sex objects: 12 (12.37%)

Women as materialistic: 14 (14.43%)

Women as nagging: 1 (1.03%)

Women as caretakers: 12 (12.37%)

Men as sex objects: 11 (11.34%)

Men as materialistic: 20 (20.62%)

Men as nagging: 7 (7.22%)

Men as caretakers: 12 (12.38%)

Women acting like men: 1 (1.03%)

Men acting like women: 15 (15.46%)