Gourmet Ads

As I looked in the rack for a magazine to analyze today, my stomach was rumbling. It was lunchtime. Unsurprisingly, I ended up with Gourmet, a magazine for food-lovers and chefs. Settling down with my choice, mouth watering, I flipped through the first few pages of ads. And flipped...and flipped. A whopping 26 pages later, I finally hit the editor's letter. It wasn't until page 40 that I found what I would consider another real article.

Is this what magazines have come to these days? A book of ads with a few articles in between? Silly me: I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.

Admitting defeat, I decided to abandon my idea of analyzing the articles and analyze the ads instead. After all, they appeared to make up the bulk of the magazine. In fact, by my count, full page ads took up 120 pages of this 246-page magazine, and many of the pages with articles also had partial-page ads. In other words, less than half the magazine was made up of articles.

So who were these ads trying to target? Before looking inside, I imagined the average reader of Gourmet to be chefs and serious food aficionados. I expected to see mostly ads for cookware, and gourmet food products. I did find ads for these things, however, the other products advertised ranged from lipstick, to cars, to paint, even. Seeing everyday items included makes me think that the readership of Gourmet is a little broader than I'd originally thought.

Another interesting thing I noticed about the ads was how they were tailored to fit the theme of food. Bloomingdale's, for example, included in their ad a frosting recipe, complete with pictures of cute, neatly frosted pink cupcakes. I thought that this was an clever way to grab the reader's eye while blending in with the overall theme of the magazine. But damn, it made me hungry.