“African-American Males in Advertisements in Primarily African-American Magazines”

Summary of Previous Findings
In study one, African-American men are often represented in ads, but mostly in ads for clothes shoes and accessories. In study two, African-American men were not seen often but they usually played major roles when they were shown.

Summary of the Previous Study
The study conducted by Ainsworth Anthony Bailey was done in two different parts. The first part used ads from two magazines aimed at an African-American audience and the second used two African-American magazines and two “mainstream” magazines. The first part of the study showed that African-American males are often only shown in nonoccupational roles or had limited portrayals in business or work-related settings, and while the second study showed a broader range of products advertised, the settings and roles were still similar.

Most Important Foundation Literature and Its Relation to the Current Study
The most important literature used by Bailey was a combination of two studies. The first was Shuey, King and Griffith’s “Stereotyping of Negroes and Whites: An Analysis of Magazine Pictures” from 1953 which described how African-Americans were portrayed in the .6% of ads they were in. The second was Taylor and Lee’s “Portrayals of African, Hispanic, and Asian Americans in Magazine Advertisements” from 1995 which showed an increase in the number of ads depicting African Americans rising and the role portrayals and products advertised improving. This literature was a basis for Bailey’s study of how African-American men are portrayed in the new genre of magazines directed toward the African-American market.

Corpus and Method
My corpus consists of full-page ads found in the January 2006 issue of Ebony and December 2005 issue of VIBE. This is a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the number of ads featuring African-American males, the products being advertised and the role the man seems to portray.

Findings





The men shown in the VIBE issue studied were advertising one of four things—shoes, clothes, liquor or CDs—with almost no exceptions. They were mostly shown with nothing around them to indicate class, though the products advertised would indicate that the people would have money. Most of the men shown are well-known, successful and respected in their fields. The men in Ebony, on the other hand, were shown advertising cars, the U.S. Navy, and a service offered for cell phone ring tones. The men in these ads appear to be more successful than those in VIBE. The men in VIBE are dressed in what is typically thought of as “hip-hop” fashion whereas those in Ebony are all well dressed. Only one ad in each magazine puts the man in the setting of his job. One is the director of “A Raisin in the Sun” sitting in the middle of an empty theatre and the other is a man who is a law student standing in the middle of a courtroom—oddly enough, this ad is for Honda.

Conclusions
This study fits the previous study pretty much exactly. Though the men in Ebony’s ads were portrayed in more professional and successful ways than in VIBE, the percentage of ads featuring African-American males is almost insignificant in comparison. One difference between this study and the previous one may be the use of all of the full-page ads in the magazines. The previous study does not say if Bailey used ads that did not include people in the design. The portrayal of African-American men in television commercials as compared to print ads might be a study that would be worthwhile to conduct.