Final Paper

(Final Project) Prevalence of Sexually Oriented Advertising on Popular Web Sites.

How prevalent are sexually oriented ads on the internet’s mainstream sites? What are some of the features common to mainstream SOA?

Previous Study:

The previous study from Artemio Ramirez Jr. (“Sexually Oriented Appeals on the Internet,” 2006, SEX in Consumer Culture) showed several mainstream websites categorized by the type of information offered, from Sports to Entertainment to News. Results showed that all three categories of websites contained some sort of sexually oriented advertising within. News sites contained the smallest amount of SOA, while entertainment and sports sites varied greatly in size but were generally more saturated with SOA.

The second set of results showed that among the sexually oriented ads on these sites nearly all of them highlighted physical features and nearly a quarter of all ads featured movement, context, proxemics, and combinations of the three.

These conclusions lead the researchers to agree that sex does sell on the internet.

Relevant literature:

Relevant studies by previous researchers Kaye & Medoff (2001) on browsing behavior contributed to Ramirez’s study above. Lambiase (2003, pg 257) also contributed with theories about the evolvement of SOA on the internet. She explained that sophisticated technology is using demographics and other information gathered through browsing habits to adjust ads to the consumer.

Corpus and Method:

My corpus examines six mainstream web sites from three major categories. News sites (CNN.com, Foxnews.com), sports sites (ESPN.com, CBSsports.com) and entertainment sites (Eonline.com, MTV.com). First the web sites homepages were scanned for advertisements including banners, pop ups and scrolling texts. Each ad was classified as to whether or not it contained sexually oriented advertising. The ads that did contain SOA were then coded based on their attributes, such as movement, context, and the prevalence of sexualized physical features. Each was then broken down in to a percentage. In order to ensure that my own browsing habits would not interfere, three different computers were used in the Willis Library, one for each site. All three websites were accessed on the same day (Wednesday November 7, 2007) within the course of one hour. I tried to stay away from links with pictures that may have been promoting a television show being shown on a partner of some of the websites (E! and ESPN in particular).

Findings:

Surprisingly, the news websites contained the larger amount of advertisements including sexually oriented attributes. The proportion of ads that did actually contain SOA were, however, relatively close across the board. ESPN.com ended up with 1out of 3 ads containing SOA for a percentage of .33, while CBSsports.com had 1 out of 6 for a .167. All of the SOA on these two sites could be coded as having highlighted physical features and movement. CNN.com contained 2 SOA’s out of 10 ads for a .2 and FoxNews.com had 2 SOA’s as well out of 13 ads for a final percentage of .154. Both of these websites contained print ads for singles that could only be coded as contextual. The entertainment sites such as MTV.com had 1 SOA out of 3 ads for a .33 and Eonline.com was 2 for 7 with a .286. Both of these websites feature SOA with highlighted physical features, movement and context.

Many of the advertisements on “E!’s” website in particular for their own television shows were highly sexualized, such as shows like The Girl Next Door which features three playboy bunnies as main characters.

Conclusion:

My findings in this experiment did not necessarily fit the findings of the previous research. I did not stumble on to sexually oriented advertising as often as was suggested by the original study. Some websites did have sexualized images but they were not necessarily paid advertisements, which was what I was interested in. A larger sample of web sites within these three categories may be necessary to come up with more refined percentages in the future. Another study may be the amount of non-paid advertising on websites advertising for another form of media owned by the same company. Nearly all of the sexually oriented advertising that I came across featured women in some way. Only one appealed to women, a print ad about meeting single men on FoxNews.com.

References:

CBSsports.com

CNN.com

Eonline.com

ESPN.com

FoxNews.com

MTV.com

Ramirez, Artemio Jr. “Sexually Oriented Appeals on the Internet” 2006, SEX in Consumer Culture.

Reichert, Tom and Lambiase, Jacqueline. SEX in Consumer Culture. Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, publisher. 2006.

Great Taste! LESS FILLING!

Hot girls and beer...in today's day and age those two things just seem to go together. Although, for most of the people in this country one rarely occurs as a result of the other.
In landslide fashion, beer ads and sex wound up together, forever. Whether it was the Swedish bikini teams and Old Milwaukee or the "Great Taste. Less Filling." girls and Miller Lite...sex just sells.
Its unfortunate that this is the best way to sell beer and alcohol. Maybe one day it will all be read about in history books. Kids of the future will see the erosion of the Great American Society through the eyes of drunken men; angry because their beers were not delivered by the Coors Light twins.
Let's face it. We're a society that enjoys a little sex every now and then. Even the less than average American is intelligent enough to understand that this does not happen to many of us when we kick back with the brew...
The problem with sex and beer advertising? Apparently the better looking she is, the better her beer tastes.

Disabilities in the media.

More people in today's day and age are being portrayed with disabilities in television and news media. With the runaway success of the show Family Guy over the past 7 or 8 years, one character in particular, Joe Swanson, really catches my attention.
If you don't know already, or don't watch the show, Joe is a hot shot police officer in the town the show takes place in who supposedly had an accident on the job that left him paralyzed from the waist down. He is confined to a wheel chair from the very first episode.
If you're looking for classy humor in a show, Family Guy is not for you, as sometimes Joe's disability is made fun of, however Joe never seems to mind too much. Joe never misses a beat with his buddies because of his disability, whether its being wheel-barrowed around with skates on his hands at the roller rink or being strung like a marionette for a dance number, it may look degrading, but Joe is always having fun.
And let's not forget Joe is still a cop. He prides himself on never loosing a "perp." In several episodes his police siren pops out of his wheel chair and he wheels down the bad guys, showing great agility and upper arm strength.
While this doesn't necessarily provide inspiration to thousands of disabled people in this country, it does provide an outlet for people to laugh without feeling like they should be condemned for it. In the long run it may create a more comfortable environment for people with and without physical disability to not only talk about it but to be unashamed about having one themselves. I realize that a great many people in this world with a physical "disability" do not consider themselves disabled at all, and feel no shame for their misfortunes. Joe is pop culture's shining example of this type of person. Joe is paralyzed and doesn't let it slow him down in the slightest, all the while keeping an open mind to a few tasteless jokes. People can learn a lesson from Family Guy about "tolerance." There are appropriate ways to portray and even laugh about a disability in this world. We've all got to find something to laugh about, including ourselves once in a while.

You're a professional athlete, act like one.

The world of professional sports is going down the toilet...
In the last two years, the professional sports world, both at home and abroad has become the target of tons of negative media coverage. Most of this negativity is well deserved, as the term "professional athlete" loses all meaning entirely.
We'll start with overseas. Soccer, or futbol, depending on your nationality, is the most popular sport in the world. Certainly it is no where near the top of the American sports world, but nonetheless should be considered a premier sport. Last year one of the richest soccer clubs in all the world, Italy's Juventus was implicated in a gambling scandal involving betting on and possibly fixing games involving their own club. Many of its players and staff members were fined heavily and the club was relegated from the country's top league, the Serie A, to the Serie B. To Americans this may not seem like a big deal, but its almost like sending the entire New York Yankees franchise down to AAA baseball.
At home, Major League Baseball has been dealing with the use of steroids by its players for the last several years. Recently, the league has started naming players involved in buying these illegal drugs and is investigating them. Not only does this drag a player's name through the mud, but it also affects their club and the game of baseball. Whether a player is guilty or not anymore doesn't seem to matter, people assume everyone in baseball who can hit a home run is "juiced." Barry Bonds finally cleared the all time home run mark, and thank goodness for that. Now we can stop talking about how people don't want him to break the record because he's a black man. (It was a black man's record!) Others think he's on steroids and should have an asterisk next to his name, or be stripped of his homeruns. Whether I agree with the ladder idea or not, in this country aren't we innocent until proven guilty?
Don't even get me started on basketball and all the on court brawls and confrontations with fans over the last two seasons. Now you can't trust anyone in the NBA anymore. With one official already pleading guilty to illegal gambling, possibly fixing games, and showing loose connections in the form of debts to members of the mafia, where does it all end? Last I heard he was trying to enter a plea agreement in which he said he would name something like 20 other NBA refs who were also involved in gambling. Who do you trust? Every time I see a bad call this year that affects the outcome of a game I'm going to wonder if that referee really just blew it or did he have his own agenda? That really ruins the integrity of a game.
And of course, we end up at the big moneymaker of the group, The NFL. These days the NFL is a multi billion dollar industry. There's really no other sport that is played in such a confined area on a professional level, but has so much popularity. Football is where my heart lies. My family owned Cowboys' season tickets for nearly 30 years, and I grew up on the 50 yard line at Texas Stadium. Some of my earliest, and definitely my fondest memories are of watching the Cowboys with my dad. The 90s were a great decade to be a fan, with 3 Super Bowls in 4 years you couldn't beat the excitement. Now that I'm older and wiser, and still a huge fan, I start to see the darker side of things. Every time I turn on the TV another player is going to jail. PacMan Jones is implicated in a murder, 8 or 9 Cincinnati Bengals' are arrested in a year for various offenses, Tank Johnson convicted on felony gun charges, Michael Vick (the league's highest paid player and top jersey seller) is indicted for kingpinning a massive dog fighting ring. There have been 6 or 7 players arrested in the last year at the University of Texas alone with the latest just last week. This shows that when we give these high profile athletes a second chance, you've always got another shot waiting for you. Now these kids are starting to get in trouble, thinking that they're the next Tank Johnson, who was just signed by the Cowboys to a two year contract even though he is serving an 8 game suspension due to his legal troubles and won't be available to play until the middle of November.
AND NOW THE PATRIOTS ARE CHEATERS? How many Super Bowls did they cheat in? They've won three by a field goal or less, could they have gained a competitive advantage with that little extra video tape? While not entirely likely that it helped them during the course of the game they were taping it IS possible to gain a competitive edge from something like that. Whether it seems harmless or not it was specifically against the rules, and was recently a point of interest from Commissioner Roger Goodell. We'll probably never know how much edge it gained them, but it just goes to show that even the shiniest example of sports glory has kinks in the armor.

The bottom line here, is YOU ARE A PROFESSIONAL ATHLETE...act like one.

You are a role model...no...a hero to many people, and you need to conduct yourself accordingly. You've been given the grace, talent, and athletic ability to get into not only an elite group of people, but an elite tax-bracket, and people are going to be watching you. You not only hurt yourself but you hurt the credibility of your team and your league. Most importantly you drive the fans away. The dedicated ones like myself will always be around, clinging to what was once pure about the game, but if this trend continues, and the common fan doesn't buy tickets and jerseys anymore, there's no more big money for big time athletes.

How I get my news.

I get my news from several different sources, in small bits at a time. Generally I get my local news from television. I'm not particularly biased towards any specific newscast, usually switching between stations during commercial breaks. For sports news, which is my biggest interest, I usually go to ESPN. Whether its Sportscenter on TV, ESPN Mobile on my phone, or ESPN.com I've always got one of the three in front of me. I read the occasional magazine, generally sticking to broad topic titles like men's life magazines. I probably spend 7 to 8 hours a week seeking news coverage, mostly about sports.
When I read coverage of touchy subjects involving race or gender in the media I tend to regard as futile. Especially in sports, I get so tired of hearing how things have still got to be about race all of the time. For example, people think Barry Bonds did steroids because in less than a year the man's body doubled in size and he went up two hat sizes, NOT BECAUSE HE'S BLACK and we don't want him to break the home run record because of it. I keep hearing this argument wondering when anyone was going to mention that the record in question has been held by a black man for 30 years.