Esquire A Content Analasys
At first glance, Esquire magazine seems harmless enough. In fact, I often thought of it as the magazine for an unenlightened J. Alfred Prufrock. J. Alfred Prufrock was the dissatisfied upper class crybaby created by T. S. Eliot. Both Prufrock and Eliot himself choose to use initials instead of full names to accomplish an air of upper classmanship. This is very much in the same vein as naming a magazine Esquire which, according to my computer thesaurus, is synonyms with such words as sir or aristocrat. Certainly not terms of the lower or middle class. Upon further inspection I find that to be somewhat true. The overall messages seem to reiterate certain ideals held valuable among the young, urban, professional male. The magazine frequently deals with that lifestyle by focussing on fashion, sex, top of the notch booze, designer cars and even preys on their fears with fitness and hair saving products. To begin my research I literally tore apart my copy of the March 1999 Esquire. Once all pages were ripped out I began to organize them and make calculations and judgements upon that. All in all, including cover pages and ads, there were 201 total pages. Of these 201 pages the advertisements add up
Besides these real articles, there were a total of 72 pages of content that were neither advertisements nor endorsements. This still only account for 36% of all pages. The gratuitous endorsements, primarily fashion spreads, total 14% or the magazine. Two of the endorsements are for high priced cars. The VW Pasat has a short write up. The Mercedes Benz-S class had one of it’s own. There were forty different fashion companies endorsed and of those, 25% of the companies advertised somewhere in this issue. Many, many more of those advertise regularly in Esquire as well. Not included in the endorsement totals was a two page article about how some guy really likes Pinot Noir wines and then goes on to endorse fifteen different brands. This appears in a section called “Man at His Best”. The “Man at His Best” section is a regular appearance in Esquire. Within that section they have subsections such as the wine review which appeared under the subtitle, “Drinking”. It was also in the “Man at His Best” section that the car endorsements were in. The one section that completely dominated the ads was fashion. I hadn’t expected to see so much emphasis on fashion in a man’s magazine yet 47% of all the advertisements were. This makes sense considering the audience. The men they pander too are to urban professionals and apparently always aiming to look their best. to 93.33 pages or 46% of all pages. For reference, I also calculated two other Esquire issues for a frame of reference. The findings were similar there too. For instance, in June 1999 66 of 168 pages were ads equaling roughly 39%. October of 1998 was also close with 74 pages of 185 equaling 40% approximately. There weren’t any real surprises to be honest. Of these pages almost everything I thought there would be a ton of didn’t really add up to much. Alcohol ads only account for 8% of all the ads. Tobacco companies accounted for 10% of the ads. The tobacco ads were tricky to count. The Davidoff Company has three pages worth of ads. This company produces some of the world’s most popular cigars. Here in the magazine they simply advertise two of their colognes, “Good Life” and “Cool Water”. Also tricky in the tobacco ads was a 1/3-
Some common words found in the essay are:
Navigator Chrysler, Prufrock Eliot, Boy Scout, Pinot Noir, Alcohol Tobacco, St Patty’s, Davidoff Company, Mercedes Benz-S, Larry Flynt, Esquire Accompanying, “man best”, “man best” section, 29 pages, ads tobacco, fashion sex, tobacco ads, considering audience, best” section, aids epidemic, tobacco cars, 201 pages,
Approximate Word count = 1567
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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