My Researching Methods

The primary materials I selected for my paper to analyze are appliance advertisements from the 1960’s, all from Look and Ladies’ Home Journal. I also have current appliance advertisements featuring females from the LG appliance ad campaign. Some of the advertisements are from the LG website, and one is from a Good Housekeeping magazine, but the downloaded image for the purpose of putting it online was found on the LG site. My grandmother was my primary source interview.

I interviewed my grandmother, Jean Streinz, and she is relevant to the project because she was a wife, a mother, and a worker during the time period I am looking into. My grandmother has plenty of experience with being exposed to the advertisements of those days, as well as working as a graphic artist and struggling with being at home or at work.

My grandmother has worked in the magazine industry. As I stated, she was a graphic artist and among the many shops she worked for two were for magazines. One position was a production supervisor for a ceramics magazine and the other was a brief stint as Art Director for Seattle Weekly. Due to her involvement and interest in magazines already and her role as part stay-at-home mother and a graphic artist, she had an interesting take on the way advertisements were and still are. In addition, she’s a bit of a feminist so it was interesting.

In regards to analyzing my material, I did a lot of comparing and contrasting with the 1960’s images and the current appliance images. It helped to read Advertising to the American Woman by Daniel Delis Hill (a secondary source) and learn some of the background of the time before I began to look at the ads and their differences. It helped me to have a greater understanding of why they were different, beyond the “duh” conclusion of the times changing. After interviewing my grandmother, who brought up important points about World War II and the impact it had on women and advertising (something I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about), I went back and re-read that section in Hill’s book to analyze World War II and compare his take on it with my grandmother’s take on it. They had pretty much the same view, which is that there was discontent among women to return home after having worked and gained useful skills in addition to earning money.

To analyze many of the ads I just spent a lot of time looking at them. I looked at all the components of the ad, especially what the woman was doing and the copy (it is too bad but much of the copy doesn’t come through in the images). Much of the copy in the ads is aimed at women, persuading them to buy one new appliance or another, because they make most of the buying decisions for the household, especially regarding appliances seeing as how that was - stereotypically speaking – their area of expertise in addition to cooking. I compared the 1960s copy – long, paragraph form, explanatory – to LG’s advertisement copy, which is much shorter and much many of the ads have a sentence or two to grab attention, if not one snappy, short line. The differences there were interesting. I also looked at what the women in the more current appliance ads were shown doing, and compared that to the 1960s ads. Comparing and contrasting the ads is how I came up with my conclusion, which will be stated in a later blog entry.