Tide and Audience

Tide and Audience

1. Theorists and their Theories

   • Stuart Hall
     • Representations
       • The images of the two women hanging the laundry represents the audience's lives and lifestyles at the time
       • The women in the advert act as a role model to the audience, depicting a domestic goddess who is successful in all aspects of her family life
         • This idea of "domestic perfection" is an ideal that the audience will strive to reach and may want to construct their own sense of identity against
     • Two-Step Flow
       • Good Housekeeping magazine was an opinion-leader
         • Their opinions were held in high regard and many of their opinions reflected the majority of the viewerbase
     • Reception
       • When a media product is produced, the creator of the product encodes messages into it
         • It is up to the audience to decode those messages in their own way, but there are 3 main readings
           • Dominant/Preferred
             • How the producer wants the audience to view the media text, they agree with the message is it conveying
           • Negotiated
             • A compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings, the audience understand and agree with the text but disagree with other areas they have their own views on
           • Oppositional
             • The audience rejects the encoded meaning and creates their own meaning for the text, they fully disagree with the message being submitted
   • Gerbner
     • Cultivation
       • After an extended exposure to a media product, a person or group will adopt ideologies and the beliefs portrayed in the media product
         • Women in the post-war America were exposed to countless advertisements for domestic products that aimed to make them believe that they need to stay at home and care for the house and kids they were expected to have

2. Media language

   • Historic context
     • The post-WW2 consumer boom of the 1950s included the rapid development of new technologies for the home
       • Vacuum cleaners, fridge freezers, microwave ovens and washing machines all became desirable products in the 1950s
         • Many technologies were developed just to make life easier
       • There was a Consumer Culture and America was introduced to the concept of brands and unique selling points
     • There were segregated roles in the family
       • Mothers were the expressive roles
       • Fathers were the instrumental role
         • Men were expected the be the leader and main earner of income in the family, providing for all of his family
           • Despite this, women were able to start earning money
         • Men were pressured to have a wife they can be proud of
     • The American Dream
       • "Keeping up with the Jones'"
   • Social/Cultural context
     • Print adverts from the 1950s conventionally used more copy than we're used to seeing today
     • Housewives always tried to impress their husbands
       • They were pressured to by society
     • The red lipstick is very sexualised, this is appropriate for a western market but for an eastern market, especially at the time, this would not have been appropriate
     • There was an increase in marriages, men were returning from the war
       • In turn, there was a baby boom and the number of consumers dramatically increased and the need for family products also increased
     • The advert uses more print than the majority of modern advertisements, this is because of a lot of products needed explaining as a lot of them were brand new concepts
     • TV took over the radio, this was the golden age of TV

3. Representation

   • The dress code of the adverts main female characters include a stereotypical 1950s hairstyle
   • The fashion for women having shorter hair had a practical application as long hair was dangerous for women working with machinery on farms
   • Having her hair held back connotes she's focused on her work, though this is perhaps binary opposed to the full make-up she is wearing
     • The headband or scarf worn by the woman also links to the practicality of the dress code for women in the factories during the second world war
   • The woman symbolically embracing the Tide product could represent how she is embracing her role in society by literally embracing a domestic product