General Information about Vibe Magazine - Case Study Example

Vibe Magazine General information about Vibe Vibe magazine is an entertainment magazine that was started in early 90s (1993) by a businessman, Quincy Jones in conjunction with Time, Inc. The magazine was launched when the internet was still very young and not very accessible by the public but only by government organizations and institutions such as universities (McKay, 2006). This means that the readership of print media was still very widespread because the cyber sphere had not created its place in the information industry. Vide magazine is a celebrity magazine that is concerned with news and information related to the music industry, the magazine is in circulation in the United States and is headquartered in New York. The magazine has a circulation of 301,408. The magazine features R&B and Rap music news and celebrity as well as other news in the entertainment industry such as actors, movie directors etc. however, the magazine has an open bias for rap music, as seen by how the magazine features the many rap music in America. The magazine also runs a completion for best rapper alive. Estimated pass on rates It is estimated that each copy of the magazine is likely to be ready by as many as four people. Many people say they read Vibe magazine even those that are many months old. This could be because of the graphical format of the magazine that makes it easy for people to read and entertaining as well (Bignell, 1997). The magazines online version is also as glossy and is a perfect eye candy for people who visit these pages. Cover of Vibe magazine Vibe magazine has been seen to be very creative in the way it designs its cover and has used creativity of its cover to increase popularity of the magazine. The magazine has used celebrities such as Rap and R&B musician Mary J. Blige for its cover especially during its first few days when it was launched. The cover of the magazine is a graphical one and unlike in many magazines, the cover of Vibe magazine is usually more creative and graphical. The cover of Vibe magazine always has a celebrity and sometimes a single celebrity may be in the cover for many issues of the magazines, either continually or not. The back cover serves as a feature in the magazines, offering readers a sneak peak of the development in the music industry and also looking at the Caribbean market. Format Vibe has a clear format which makes it easy for readers to be able to be able to read the magazine and easy for them to find their interest in the magazine as well. It has specific structure such as a 20-question feature at the back of the magazine that addresses reggae music and Caribbean music in general. Vibe has also entered in to the internet domain since the development of the internet and it has an online version of the magazine that is a mirror for the printed version. The online version is even more dynamic and the contents can change much more dynamically unlike the printed version that is a bimonthly magazine and once printed and circulated cannot be changed. Location in the marketplace (competitors etc) The magazine is headquartered in New York and but is in circulation in most of North American country. This huge circulation is probably caused by the fact that rap and R&B music is an American affair that covers the all states of America. The man competitors of the Vibe magazine are other entertainment magazines such as Playboy. However, due to its creative and different from streamline format, the magazine is able to access a different market niche that has not been tapped by other entertainment magazines. Description of general content The magazine offers news about the celebrities in the entertainments industry. The magazine maintains a graphical approach to its content and most of its content is colorful pictures rather than many les of articles. The magazines features in each of its issue a huge volume of rap and R$B artists who are on the pages of the magazine. Apart from celebrity and entertain news, Vibe also features information about state of the art technology and news such as cars, electronics etc. Advertising and other commercial activities The Vibe magazine has been a very important and useful platform of advertisements. Most of the advertisements are almost hard to differentiate from the non promotional content of the magazine especially because the magazine’s content and structure is very creative and graphic oriented. The magazine offers a very good way for those people wishing to advertise their businesses on the magazine. News The magazine provides readers with news in the entertainment industry. This news includes new content in the market such as released albums, news about celebrities and general industry news. The magazines also offers news for such events as award giving ceremonies such as the granny awards and any other entertainment industry awards such as BET, MTV etc. Vibe also offers news for other things that may not be related to celebrities such but are related to entertainment especially those that may be of importance to its readers (Berger, 2000). Entertainment Apart from offering news to the reader, the magazine is also a very good source of entertainment to the reader. Vibe magazine is creatively designed to be an entertaining magazine more than just a magazine that offers entertainment news. This aspect of Vibe magazine may be indicative of the reason why the magazine is less of a reading magazine but a sighting magazine. Because the pages of the magazines are filled with colorful pictures and photos of things such as state of the art cars, electronic etc that help the reader learn about the current affairs of things and inform them what they may need to buy and what to expect it the market, the magazine is regarded as a very useful way for the reader to relax and the because the reader does less of reading and more viewing. Part II: Analysis of Vibe Magazine Methodology – Structure of the content analysis and coding There are two reasons why Vibe magazine was chosen for this study. One, is that it is a music magazine. Just like in many other magazines it is expected that that a lot of celebrities will be found on the pages of ‘Vibe’ because of the genre of the magazine. And two, because its American, which is another reason why there will be a high number of celebrities in it. It is Imminent that that celebrity presence is not only common in magazines but also in other media platform such as TV (many celebrities have their own talk shows for example Oprah Windrey, Wendy Williams, Tyra Banks) Research question: ‘are there more celebrity advertisements in magazines than non celebrity advertisements?’ There are still a number of advertisers who bank on using the fame and popularity of celebrities to advertise their products, and therefore determine the success and guarantee high sale revenues. By conducting content analysis I am hoping to find out whether advertisements with celebrities is higher than adverts with none celebrities, and determine which type of adverts are more popular. My hypothesis is that the number of adverts including celebrities will be lower than the number of adverts with no celebrities featured. There are both advantages and disadvantages of celebrity advertising. For instance make up companies love to use celebrities in their adverts. One big disadvantage is that they are not as effective as we think they are. There are a lot of people that like Beyoncé but yet again there are people who don’t like her. You don’t want people to make pre judgement based on the celebrity the ad is featuring. Instead advertisers should focus on the measures of persuasion for example. This is why this study is very important and can be a good base on future studies that may be very helpful in helping advertisers to better their advertisement strategies. The way the process of conducting content analysis is by; A) Counting all the adverts all together in each issue of ‘Vibe’ magazine. B) Counting the number of adverts featuring celebrities. C) Counting the number of adverts with no celebrities. D) Then the number of adverts featuring celebrities will be divided into two main categories. Category one - adverts featuring celebrities aimed at women and Category two - adverts featuring celebrities aimed at men. The nature of the magazine and its target audience will pay an important part in when it comes to the statistics. And in order to make this content analysis research more reliable and therefore in addition to that it will be important to pick up another music magazine and do the same in order to see if there’s any correlation between number of celebrities adverts in music magazines or not. Vibe issue1 Vibe issue2 Vibe issue3 Other music magazine No.of adverts 98 100 96 58 No. of adverts featuring celebrities 17 No. of adverts with no celebrities 55 60 56 41 Table 1.0 showing the advertisement data for Vibe Magazine Adverts featuring celebrity- this would be an advert that has somebody from the media industry- more specifically the entertainment branch. They could be involved in music, movies, TV shows, and comedians. Usually people that are seen in the gammy awards/ music awards etc. in those adverts we would usually see a product or service being promoted one of those people who are in the public eye. Findings The study showed that there are more advertisements that have non-celebrity in them and there are fewer advertisements that feature celebrities in them. This was established by the counting of the advertisements in number of advertisements and then dividing them into those two categories to identify which are more than the others. The second finding indicated that those advertisements that feature celebrities in them are more directed to women than men. Among the advertisements that featured celebrities, a greater number of them were those that advertised products that are related to females such as fashion and apparel, makeup etc. Those advertisements that advertised products that are more masculine, such as electronics, cars etc, were fewer in them and these kind of adverts fell under the other category, that is, those featuring non-celebrities in them. In fact, most of these advertisements had not human beings in them and used other forms of communication rather than featuring a human agent in them. Discussion The above study showed that contrary to major belief, the number of advertisements with celebrities in them is less than the number of the advertisements with non celebrities in them. This finding is very important because it indicates a number of things as follows. More and more firms are realising that for the advertisements to be effective they don’t have to be delivered with by celebrities (Stokes, 2003) and (Gibson, 2008). This, as Watson (2009) says, means that the business community has realised that advertising is about reaching to the consumer and appealing to his or her reason to show that the product is worth his or her attentions. This is contrary to earlier notion that advertisements is about reaching to the customers emotions without convincing the customer at the intellectual level that the product is good for them. In fact most of the advertisements nether fell on any of the categories described in the study. The many advertisements did not feature any human beings. However, for the purposes of this study, these advertisements were classifies as advertisements with non-celebrity people. This can be very important for businesses because the use of celebrities in adverts can be very costly for the firm and if there is no guarantee that the use of these celebrities is better than using non celebrities is more productive for the firm (Jacques, 2009). Problems and issues with findings The study was only designed to identify if there are more advertisements featuring celebrities than those featuring non celebrities. The study was not designed to identify whether advertisements wit celebrities are more effective than advertisements with non-celebrities. For this reason, this study will recommend that such a study be carried out because this can be useful for the business communities. However, this study can be very useful as a base for future studies on the subjects. Conclusion There seemed to be direct relationship between the nature of advertisements in the Vibe Magazine and the nature and format if the magazines. It would be expected that since Vibe deals with a lot of celebrities in its content, that the advertisements in the magazine would feature more celebrities in them. Yet, this is not the case because the study showed very clearly that there were more advertisements in the magazines that did not feature celebrities than those that featured. However, there could be an indirect correlation between the nature of advertisements and the magazines. For instance, since, celebrity advertisements banks on the hope that consumers are likely to relate with celebrities and thus likely to use the things that the celebrities use, it can be seen that advertising in Vibe magazine would help in achieving this because people are likely to want to buy the things that are advertised in the magazine where their favorite celebrities are seen, i.e., the Vibe magazine. If this be the case, this kind on indirect celebrity advertisements would be very important because the negative side of celebrity advertising would be overcome. For instance, the main negative effect of celebrity advertising is that while it may appeal to the people who like the celebrity, it will do the opposite to those who dislike the celebrity (William, 2009). In this case, because the celebrities are not used directly, it will be important to note that this negative effect because everyone who sees the advertisements will relate the advertisements to their favorite celebrities as opposed to the celebrities they don’t like. Strengths of the magazine The main strength of the magazine is the fact that Vibe magazine has been able to use creativity in the way it presents its contents so that the users are still more interested in the magazine even after the reading generation is dying away. The importance of this is the fact that the magazine still has a very big and wide audience which is a god thing for the advertisers. As Maxwell (2011) puts it, Vibe also has a pan American distribution and this makes it a very strong media of communication across the North American nation. The fact that Vibe deals with entertainment and music in particular is also a big advantage because this means that the magazine can appeal to everyone, considering that everybody likes music, whether old, young, female, and male and regardless of religion (Stokes, 1999). Vibe has also tried to capture the American audience by making Rap and R&B music its mantelpiece because these two genres of music are household items for any American family. By doing this, Vibe has managed to make sure that the magazine is like a family magazine that can be read by any member of the family. References Berger, A., 2000. Media and Communications Research Methods. London: Sage. – for details of how to do a content analysis. Gibson, K., 2008. Ingredients for the New Media. Journal of American Media Studies, 29-34. Jacques, K., 2009. Media Today. New York, NY: Pearson . Jane, S., 2003. How to Do Media and Cultural Studies. London: Sage – more on content analysis. Jane, S., 1999. Use It or Lose It’ in Jane Stokes and Anna Reading. London: Macmillan - sample content analysis on teenage girls’ magazines. Jenny, M., 2006. The Magazines Handbook. Abingdon: Routledge. Jonathan, B., 1997. Media Semiotics: an Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press - For semiotic analysis particularly the whole section on magazines. Maxwell, N., 2011. American Media Development . International Journal of Information and Communication, 29-31. Watson, K., 2009. Introduction to Medai nd the Internet. Journal of Modern Media, 43-45. William, N., 2009. Increamental Chang ein Media. Journal Media and Communication, 87-89. Read More