Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age

4: Rethinking Readership

4 Rethinking Readership The Digital Challenge of Audience Construction “Never Drink and Text.” This irreverent phrase was imprinted on an assortment of fuchsia-and-white-hued iPhone cases that were distributed to young women as part of Condé Nast’s “Generation Glamour” branding campaign. Launched in the fall of 2012, the campaign targeted women in the so-called millennial generation, a highly coveted cohort that includes individuals born in or after 1980. Andy Spade, cofounder of the agency responsible for producing Glamour’s quarter-million-dollar campaign, offered his take on the millennial woman: “[She] is out there living in social media, influencing people with her opinions. . . . She shares her likes, she’s tweeting, she’s texting.”1 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the campaign had a vibrant presence across social media sites such as Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. The digital components of the campaign coincided with a series of changes to the print magazine, including a redesigned cover format, enhanced coverage of celebrities , and an increased emphasis on reader contributions. Acknowledging the critical role of market research in this brand overhaul, Glamour’s executive vice president and publishing director, William Wackermann, noted, “We did a ton of research into the millennials. . . . Why is everyone changing their nails? It’s about self-expression. . . . women are interested in constant change, constant expression.” Wackermann added, “She has a voice that’s very distinct; it’s a voice that’s almost entitlement.”2 As this example reveals, media executives strive to learn as much as possible about their audience members—who they are, what they do, and how they think, along with scores of other insights. Put simply, producers aspire to know their audience. Yet this strategic imperative is built upon the as- rethinking readership · 69 sumption that “the audience” is a real set of individuals, rather than a purely discursive construction. That is, media producers’ ideas about audiences may be quite different from the ways in which individual members of “the audience ” understand themselves.3 Thus, while Glamour executives might see a particular reader as a college-educated Caucasian female who fits into certain age and income brackets, that individual may not consider those factors to be particularly salient to her own self-concept. Or she may feel that she has little in common with the millions of other young women who happen to fit within these same categories. As communication theorist Jay Blumler explains, mediated audience assumptions “often lack richness, complexity, or variety.”4 Cultural theorist Raymond Williams called attention to the constructed nature of audiences more than five decades ago with his oft-cited declaration “There are in fact no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”5 Since then, the understanding that media audiences are industrially created and economically incentivized categories has gained considerable traction. Writing in 1994, media scholars James S. Ettema and D. Charles Whitney used the term “audiencemaking” to describe the processes through which media institutions and communicators define and delineate audiences; presumably , such assumptions help producers make sense of their daily work routines and products. Ettema and Whitney noted that audience constructions are often sites of contestation as various stakeholders—media producers , advertisers, government entities, and measurement services—vie to set the terms of audience categories.6 Joseph Turow, Ien Ang, and Philip Napoli have also addressed the significance of metrics services in slicing and dicing, measuring and commodifying, and packaging and presenting audiences to advertisers.7 Meaningful social implications emerge from such activities: by providing demographic, psychographic, and behavioral statistics on current and potential consumers, measurement techniques simultaneously reflect and reify existing social divisions. Within the consumer magazine industry, research-driven audience segmentation is the sine qua non of the business. As I explained in chapter 1, editors and publishers of women’s magazines have long targeted narrowly defined segments of the female populace—and advertisers clamoring to reach women in those neatly defined factions. These segments are based upon demographic factors (age, household income, marital status, educational level, and occasionally race) as well as lifestyle traits and behaviors. Niche segments may include fitness enthusiasts, aspirational domestic mavens, and soon-to-be brides. Those working in the industry draw upon surveys 70 . chapter 4 and other measurement techniques to understand these segments and craft detailed profiles of their “ideal reader.”8 With such profiles in mind, they can make decisions about their respective magazines’ content, tone, format, and advertisements. Readership research is...