I was browsing through some of the online versions of teen magazines when I noticed a trend in advertising for teen girls: "beauty" products and sweepstakes. I visited the sites of Seventeen, ym, and Teen. Clearly, the ads on this site are geared toward adolescent and teen girls. The most common ads were those for subscriptions to the magazine and any other they're affiliated with-- such as Teen Vogue and CosmoGirl. (On a side note, all of the websites of these magazines look and feel pretty much the same, so it's no wonder their ads are similar as well.) But besides advertising the magazine itself, by far the most frequent ad was for beauty products-- especially lipgloss and eyeshadow. This came as no huge surprise, but what I found really interesting was the number of ads that display the phrase "You Could Win!" Over half of the ads on the main homepages of these sites had some sort of a connection to a contest. In just one minute of browsing, I was able to find the following: "Win $250,000" next to a picture of their magazine; "Win This" next to a gown, "Text Win!" inserted into a CoverGirl add for lipgloss, and "Enter to Win a $25,000" shopping spree. What is it about teen girls that elicit this kind of ad?
My initial analysis of this "sweepstakes" kind of advertising is that, in order to be effective, the audience must believe they have a chance to win. A younger audience is likely to be more gullible, or at least less skeptical, which would explain why these ads are so prominent in teen magazines. It would be interesting to take a look at magazines for older audiences and compare the frequency of these contests or drawings-- I would guess that as the intended audience ages, the less common "sweepstakes" ads would be. Also, I think it's important to take note of the prizes being offered. In these teen magazines, the prizes are always glamorous-- either in terms of the products (cosmetics, name brand clothes, etc.) or money (often intended for "shopping spree" money). As girls become adolescence, there is an explicit and pronounced focus on physical appearance. Glamour is admired and beauty if sought after. The advertisers for these teen magazines are capitalizing on teen girls' desires to be fashionable, beautiful, and glamourous (are any of those things different?), and what better way to become those things than winning them? Finally, another commonality among these sweepstakes ads is that they're all brightly colored (with bright pink, of course, being especially prominent), they all use big, bubbly text, and they often feature a pretty, smiling teen girl. What does this portray? That when a girl wins these great products (or, really, when they don't win them and buy them anyway), they will become beautiful and happy.
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Young teen girls are huge for advertisers. If covergirl can get young girls to use their makeup they can get a buyer for life. Women are typically the center of influence of household buying. Advertisers want and need to advertise to young teen to capture them for life time buyers. The sweepstakes phoneme is very much geared to a younger audience. Younger audiences do not have as much buying power I wonder if that makes sweepstakes more popular. I think as you get older you become more conscious of the odds of sweepstakes and do not want advertisers to have you personal information.
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