Here’s a scary thought. You know those specialty magazines for motorcyclists, woodworkers, home designers, and computer users? People read them for the advertisements, according to Deborah Branscum’s “Magazines Feed Desire.”
Branscum quotes from a forthcoming paper by Rusell W. Belk, N. Eldon Tanner Professor of Business at the University of Utah:
“Far from resisting temptations, these consumers read specialty magazines (and no doubt use other sources of stimulation as well) specifically in order to find new and better things to wish for, want, and own. Far from resisting advertisers’ appeals and ignoring their messages, they hang on every word and image and return to these ads repeatedly, as if they were religious scholars studying a sacred text. And far from a cultivated equilibrium of consumer satisfaction balanced between rationality and passion (Sherry 1990), they seek a frenzied madness in the market and relish allowing their desires to run wild (see Bakhtin 1984; Buttimer and Kavanagh 1995).”
Here I thought all those years I spent writing for the computer trades people were actually reading my work. Sigh. All that time I thought the ads were filler. I’m shocked—shocked, I tell you—to learn that I was the filler.
On the other hand, come to think of it, I haven’t subscribed to or picked up a specialty magazine in years.
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