A Level Media Studies Knowledge Booklet Component 1 A level Media Studies – Set Product Fact Sheet Tide print advert (1950s) Image Courtesy of The Advertising Archives A level Media Studies – Set Product Fact Sheet Tide print advert (1950s) AS Component 1: development and, with so many ‘new’ brands and Investigating the Media products entering markets, potential customers A level Component 1: Media typically needed more information about them than Products, Industries and Audiences a modern audience, more used to advertising, marketing and branding, might need. Conventions of print-based advertising are still Focus areas: recognisable in this text however, as detailed below. Media language Representation Consider codes and conventions, and how media language influences meaning: Audiences Media contexts • Z-line and a rough rule of thirds can be applied to its composition. PRODUCT CONTEXT • Bright, primary colours connote the • Designed specifically for heavy-duty, machine positive associations the producers want cleaning, Procter & Gamble launched Tide in the audience to make with the product. 1946 and it quickly became the brand leader in • Headings, subheadings and slogans are America, a position it maintains today. written in sans-serif font, connoting an • The D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles informal mode of address. (DMB&B) advertising agency handled P&G’s • This is reinforced with the comic strip style accounts throughout the 1950s. Its campaigns image in the bottom right-hand corner with for Tide referred explicitly to P&G because two women ‘talking’ about the product using their market research showed that consumers informal lexis (“sudsing whizz”). had high levels of confidence in the company. • The more ‘technical’ details of the product • Uniquely, DMB&B used print and radio are written in a serif font, connoting the advertising campaigns concurrently in order more ‘serious’ or ‘factual’ information that to quickly build audience familiarity with the the ‘1, 2, 3’ bullet point list includes. brand. Both media forms used the Consider theoretical perspectives: “housewife” character and the ideology that Semiotics – Roland Barthes its customers “loved” and “adored” Tide. • Suspense is created through the enigma of “what women want” (Barthes’ PART 1: STARTING POINTS – Media language Hermeneutic Code) and emphasised by the tension-building use of multiple exclamation Historical context: The post-WWII consumer boom of the 1950s marks (Barthes’ Proairetic Code). included the rapid development of new technologies • Barthes’ Semantic Code could be applied to for the home, designed to make domestic chores the use of hearts above the main image. The easier. Vacuum cleaners, fridge-freezers, microwave hearts and the woman’s gesture codes have ovens and washing machines all become desirable connotations of love and relationships. It’s products for the 1950s consumer. Products linked to connoted that this is “what women want” (in these new technologies also developed during this addition to clean laundry!). time, for example, washing powder. • Hyperbole and superlatives (“Miracle”, “World’s cleanest wash!”, “World’s whitest Cultural context: wash!”) as well as tripling (“No other…”) Print adverts from the 1950s conventionally used are used to oppose the connoted superior more copy than we’re used to seeing today. cleaning power of Tide to its competitors. Consumer culture was in its early stages of 1 A level Media Studies – Set Product Fact Sheet This Symbolic Code (Barthes) was clearly The representations in these adverts successful as Procter and Gamble’s competitor challenge stereotypical views of women being products were rapidly overtaken, making Tide confined to the domestic sphere, something the brand leader by the mid-1950s. society needed at the time as traditional ‘male roles’ were vacated as men left to fight. A level only: Structuralism – Claude Lévi-Strauss In the 1950s, while men were being targeted for the • The latter point above links to Lévi-Strauss’ post-war boom in America’s car industry, women theory, whereby texts are constructed through the were the primary market for the technologies use of binary oppositions, and meaning is made and products being developed for the home. In advertising for these types of texts, stereotypical by audiences understanding these conflicts. • In this text, “Tide gets clothes cleaner representations of domestic perfection, caring for than any other washday product you can the family and servitude to the ‘man of the house’ buy!” and “There’s nothing like Procter became linked to a more modern need for speed, and Gamble’s Tide”, reinforces the convenience and a better standard of living than the conceptual binary opposition between women experienced in the pre-war era. Tide and its commercial rivals. Consider how representations are constructed • It’s also “unlike soap,” gets laundry “whiter… through processes of selection and combination: than any soap or washing product known” and is • The dress code of the advert’s main female “truly safe” – all of which connotes that other, character include a stereotypical 1950s hairstyle inferior products do not offer what Tide does. incorporating waves, curls and rolls made fashionable by contemporary film stars such as PART 2: STARTING POINTS – Representation Veronica Lake, Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. The fashion for women having shorter hair had a Social and political contexts: practical catalyst as long hair was hazardous for Interesting intertexts to consider would be WWII women working with machinery on farms or in adverts for the ‘Women’s Land Army’ and J. Howard factories during the war. Miller’s ‘Rosie The Riveter – We Can Do It!’ advert • The headband or scarf worn by the woman also for the War Production Co-Ordinating Committee. links to the practicalities of dress code for http://www.womenslandarmy.co.uk/ww2-womens- women developed during this time. For this land-army-newspaper-recruitment-campaign/ advert, having her hair held back connotes she’s focused on her work, though this is http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/ perhaps binary opposed to the full make-up search/object/nmah_538122 that she's wearing. 2 A level Media Studies – Set Product Fact Sheet Consider theoretical perspectives: Consider how industries target audiences, and how audiences interpret and use the media: • Stuart Hall’s theory of representation – the • The likely audience demographic is constructed images of domesticity (including the two through the advert’s use of women with whom women hanging out the laundry) form part of they might personally identify (Uses and the “shared conceptual road map” that give Gratifications Theory). These young women are meaning to the “world” of the advert. Despite likely to be newly married and with young its comic strip visual construction, the scenario families (clothing belonging to men and children represented is familiar to the audience as a on the washing line creates these connotations). representation of their own lives. • The endorsement from Good Housekeeping Magazine makes them an Opinion Leader for the • David Gauntlett’s theory of identity – women target audience, reinforcing the repeated represented in the advert act as role models of assertion that Tide is the market-leading product. domestic perfection that the audience may want • The preferred reading (Stuart Hall) of the to construct their own sense of identity against. advert’s reassuring lexical fields (“trust”, “truly safe”, “miracle”, “nothing like”) is that, despite A level only: being a “new” product, Tide provides solutions • Liesbet Van Zoonen’s feminist theory – while to the audience’s domestic chores needs. their role socially and politically may have Consider theoretical perspectives: changed in the proceeding war years, the advert Reception theory – Stuart Hall perhaps contradicts Van Zoonen’s theory that • The indirect mode of address made by the the media contribute to social change by woman in the main image connotes that her representing women in non-traditional roles and relationship with the product is of prime using non-sexist language. importance (Tide has what she wants). This, • bell hooks’ feminist theory argues that lighter according to Hall, is the dominant or hegemonic skinned women are considered more desirable and encoding of the advert’s primary message fit better into the western ideology of beauty, and that should be received by “you women.” the advert could be seen to reinforce this by only • The direct mode of address of the representing “modern”, white women. This could images in the top right and bottom left- also be linked to Gilroy’s ethnicity and post- hand corner link to the imperative colonial theories that media texts reinforce “Remember!” and the use of personal colonial power. Contextually, this power has pronouns (“your wash”, “you can buy”). perhaps been challenged at this moment in American history by the events of WWII. Cultivation theory – George Gerbner • Advertising developed significantly during the 1950s and this theory, developed by PART 3: STARTING POINTS – Audiences Gerbner in the early 1970s, explains some Social context: of the ways in which audiences may be Despite women having seen their roles in society influenced by media texts such as adverts. change during the War (where they were needed • The Tide advert aims to cultivate the ideas that: in medical, military support and other roles this is the brand leader; nothing else washes to outside of the home) domestic products of the the