Magazine Advertisements

            The two magazines I will be taking a look at are "Sports Illustrated" (purchased here in the U.S) and "Emerald Rugby" (purchased in Ireland). Both of these magazines are sports related. "Sports Illustrated" covers all popular American sports, while "Emerald Rugby" focuses purely on Irish Rugby. I will be taking a look at the different advertisements found in each of the magazines.

       The first two advertisements I noticed in "Sports Illustrated" were for a car (Lexus) and a watch ( Bulova). Both of these items can be considered luxuries, considering they are very expensive products. The Lexus advertisement was very plain and simple, and had no relation to any sports. The Bulova ad featured a swimmer diving into water. There was also a beer advertisement for Michelob Ultra. The ad featured a professional golfer as well as the golfing brand "Callaway". Other ads included Gatorade, Dicks Sporting Goods, and more. In the Emerald Rugby magazine had several different advertisements for athletic supplements such as protein powder and protein bars. There was also a watch advertisement similar to the one in "Sports Illustrated", but was for the company "Boss". Other advertisements included cars (Honda), beer (Heineken), the Bank of Ireland, and others.

            Looking at the different advertisements, I found them to be very similar in the way they tried to target the audiences. For the watch ads, both magazines portrayed very elegant looking men wearing the watches. For some of the other ads, athletes were used. The main difference was that in "Sports Illustrated" a variety of athletes from different sports were in the ads. In "Emerald Rugby" only rugby players were being used to advertise the particular item. This shows a major cultural difference between the two countries. The popular sports in each country are extremely different. Rugby can be seen in many advertisements in Ireland, but it would be extremely rare to see a rugby player featured in an American advertisement.

            I had trouble finding a sports magazine out of Greece. I came across some images of a few, and they seemed to be mostly geared towards soccer. It is safe to say that soccer would be just as popular in Greece as it is all over Europe. The ads in the Greek sports magazine would be more similar to "Emerald Rugby", because rugby and soccer are two of the most popular sports throughout Europe. As far as the Hofstede Dimensions go, I found that some of the dimensions were prevalent throughout the magazines. The individualism/collectivism dimension can be seen in many of the ads. Ireland and the U.S are both very individualistic cultures, and the ads reflect this by showing . Ireland and the U.S had a decent score in the masculine/femininity dimension. The advertisements I came across seemed to be slightly more masculine, due to the fact that mostly men read these magazines, and also the athletes featured are men. Ireland and the U.S score low on the long-term orientation dimension, and you can see the ads are focused on the short term effect of their product and not concerned with the long-term.