¶ The magazine YM (Young & Modern) is a gold mine for reaching the teenage girl audience. The typical issue of YM contains articles about fashion, music, and relationships and includes tips on make-up, fitness, and guys. The language used is simple and full of youthful slang. These features make it perfect for the adolescent girl of the nineties. Just one look inside at the articles and features gives insight to the fashion-forward, boy-crazy readers. In the August 1998 issue alone, out of the 37 articles, 11 are about guys and seven about fashion. The main interest of the readers is evident. Since the audience of this magazine will also be reading the ads, the advertisers should appeal to the same people if they are to be effective. Some of them do an excellent job achieving this and others not so good. I have chosen as examples the ads for Cover Girl’s Continuous Color Lipstick and Bonne Bell’s Gear Cosmetics.
Both ads are deliberative, centralizing on what women should do. They offer the proposal that females should use the cosmetics in the ads to improve themselves. The difference is the approach taken to do it.
¶ Cover Girl’s ad for Continuous Color Lipstick features a close-up of the super model Niki Taylor with the words Cover Girl across the top of the page. She looks like a very classy, mature woman. She has an expression of satisfaction on her face. There is a small picture of four of the lipsticks in one corner with a short explanation of how the lipstick works to improve the condition of lips. The words "Imagine", Pressing", "stay" and "Continuous Color" are written in bold letters to stand out. In another corner, the slogan, "easy breezy beautiful Cover Girl" appears.
¶ In this particular ad, the Cover Girl company is speaking to the audience and trying to convey to them the message that women who use this lipstick look beautiful. They do this by focusing on the appeal to ethos. Not only is the picture of Niki Taylor the focus of the entire ad, but her name is featured in the text. A super model is most often someone that a teenage girl looks up to and a trusted critic of cosmetics. Both her beauty and all the experience she has acquired dealing with cosmetics in her career qualify her as a trustworthy source. A satisfied look on her face shows the reader how pleased she is with the product.
The result is an effective ad because the reader can use these cosmetics in attempt to one day have that same classy, mature look as Niki. The words fore mentioned in bold letters lead the reader to think that the product is something revolutionary in the present world of cosmetics. The reader "imagines" that this lipstick is something that can make anyone look as beautiful as the super model.
¶ Having said that, I can also say that it’s not as effective an ad as it could be in another publication. The teenagers that read YM magazine can only aspire to one day look like Niki because she has a sense of sophistication that most of these readers don’t have. As for the text, it includes references to the conditioners and vitamins used to explain how the lipstick works. The mentality level of the teenage girls will not allow them to regard that information as much as someone with more experience would. For example, the words “rich” and “moisturizing” may sound good to a teenager, but it’s not likely that she will take them into consideration as much as an older woman would. The ad can only be effective to a certain extent because it’s not directed to the best possible audience in this particular magazine.
¶ On the other hand, Bonne Bell’s ad for their line of Gear cosmetics is much more appropriate for the readers at hand. One of the pages features two girls with trendy hairdos attired in the latest fashions sitting on a bench. Their make-up is very natural and fresh. They have dreamy looks on their faces, as if they are looking at something pleasing. A short monologue appears in the middle of the page saying "we are dreamers. we are daring. we love to laugh and sometimes scream. we have questions. we want to believe. we are the future. we are girls." On the opposite page the make-up in the various colorful, practical containers is arranged in a casually disordered manner.
The four sentences of text throughout the page encourage girls to be speak their minds be unique.
¶ The speakers in this ad are the two girls. They try to convince the reader that they should create their own look by using Gear cosmetics. They do this by using a pathos approach: allowing the reader to relate to the speakers. One way they can convince the reader that they are just like them is to use the same energetic language that the rest of the magazine uses. Words like “daring”, “experiment”, “fun” and “colors” make the reader more comfortable with what they’re reading. The text itself is also a form of identifying with the audience. The monologue is written in all lower-case letters. This form of writing has become very popular computer language. E-mail and on-line chatting is often done with all lower-case letters. The youth of America can identify because of how much school and leisure revolve around computers now. The centralization of the text on both of the pages puts a sort of spot light on what the ad has to say in words. Attention is drawn to the text without dominating the pictures. In essence, the text says to girls that they should express themselves and use Gear Cosmetics to help do that. Phrases such as "create a look that's really you" and "Make your mouth look and taste as good as the things you say" make their motive easy to see. Another way to relate is by their sense of style. Their vividly colored dresses and fashionable accessories provide verification that they are in tune with the latest adolescent trends. This is adequate because the audience is very much interested in what those trends are. Even the dreamy looks on the girls' faces are that way to show how they feel. The expressions make the reader feel like the girls are happy because they're young, they're beautiful, and they're satisfied with their make-up. Finally, the make-up containers themselves express a connection to the energy of youth with bold colors and graphics. Their strategically relaxed placing of the cosmetics throughout the page is also a way of making the reader feel comfortable with the ad.
¶ All the preceding documentation leads to my argument that Bonne Bell’s strategy for advertisement is better than Cover Girl’s simply because they are targeting the perfect audience for the magazine it’s in. The Cover Girl ad may be more appropriately situated in a magazine such as Cosmopolitan or Vogue where the audience is the sophisticated woman portrayed in the picture. Both ads are successful in getting their message across. Bonne Bell simply has an advantage because of the readers of this particular magazine. The readers, after all, are the ones who have the power to choose which product to buy.
