Out of the Dark: A History of Radio and Rural America by Steve Craig

Targeted Audiences: Which One Suits You?

According to Steve Craig in Signs of Life in the USA, the economic structure of the television industry has a direct effect on the placement and content of all television programs and commercials. Craig is a professor in the department of radio, television, and film at the University of North Texas, Craig has written widely on television, radio history, and gender and media. His most recent book is Out of the Dark: A History of Radio and Rural America (2009). Craig talks about the analysis of four different television commercial, showing how advertisers carefully craft their ads to appeal, respectively, to male and female consumers. The gendered patterns in advertising that Craig outlines in his essay still exist today, in commercials of how a men and women are portrayed.

In Steve Craig’s, “Men’s Men and Women’s Women,” it is stated that large advertisers and their agencies have evolved the pseudo-scientific method of time purchasing based on demographics, with the age and sex of the consumer generally considered to be the most important predictors of purchasing behavior. Therefore Craig argues that computers make it easy to match market research on product buying patterns with audience research on television viewing habits, eventually building a demographic profile of the “target audience.” According to an article titled Web Advertising: Gender Differences in Beliefs, Attitudes and Behavior, previous research suggests males and females exhibit different beliefs about and attitudes toward traditional media advertising along with different advertising stimulated consumer behaviors.

Craig talks about how in John Fiske’s book, Television culture (1987, Chs. 10,11), Fiske discusses “gend...

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