Sign in or 
Share this
Being Baller: Advertising in GQ
By: Jeffery Guillermo
Recently, I was at Inagiku throwing down some sushi and savoring slightly chilled milky sake Sokujō with one of my associates, T.M., A.K.A. The Ghost. We hadn’t spoken in a month or so, so we needed to update each other on our respective maneuvers, ploys, and other news on the front. I was donning a grey two button Hugo Boss jacket, white Purple Label shirt, Tanino Crisci shoes, and a white mechanical IWC Da Vinci Chronograph. T.M. was in a black Dior three button suit, violet Armani shirt, Brioni pocket square, Vuitton sneakers, Robert Evans-eque Chanel shades, and a two tone Rolex GMT Master II. He was obviously going for the look that showed he was young enough to know better, but old enough to be stacking c-notes from different years. On the other hand, my flow was so murderous, it was autopsy. And of course, we had showstopped every sophisticated girl dining at the spot within three minutes of sitting down. These females knew that this brand of style must represent pockets on nothing less than anabolic steroids, and they were correct.
This is the kind of style that is sometimes found in real life, but more often found in the pages of Gentlemen’s Quarterly, commonly known as GQ. First published in 1958, the magazine has since begun to focus on a new market of young, loutish yet wealthy male consumers. And, this demographic, along with a plethora of other demographics, are all targets for a formidable predator, the advertising industry.
Exactly how formidable is this predator? For starters, it is estimated that the “amount spent on clothing and footwear around the world tops US$ 1 trillion a year” (Tungate 2). And, according to London-based market research firm Mintel, the global luxury goods market was worth an estimated US$ 87.7 billion in 2005, and is expected to grow by approximately a third in the period to 2010. With that much money on the line, the industry is driven by a “number of highly sophisticated marketing and branding techniques” that help keep cash flowing and bankrolls fat (Tungate 2).
Although there are many different media available to the fashion advertising industry, magazines such as GQ are still maintaining the industry’s attention for a number of reasons. Magazines offer “flexible design options, prestige, authority, believability, and long shelf life. Magazines may sit on a coffee table or shelf for months and be reread many times. People can read a magazine ad at their leisure; they can pore over the details of a photograph; and they can study carefully the information presented in the copy. This makes it an ideal medium for high-involvement think and feel products (Arens 481).
These may be effective primary reasons to spend good money on glossy magazine ads, but the reasons for placing an ad for a $4200 Ebel wristwatch on the 10th page bears heavy scrutiny. And, it turns out that these reasons do not fall far from the academic tree. Media critic Jonathan Bignell, in his seminal work Media Semiotics, writes that “in a consumer society, these real economic differences between people and classes are overlaid with an alternative structure of mythic meanings oriented around buying and owning products (consumption). So according to this critical view ads have an ideological function, since they encourage us to view our consumption positively as an activity which grants us membership of lifestyle groups. But what ads are really doing is serving the interests of those who own and control the industries of consumer culture” (Bignell 39). It is the consumer that keeps profits up, and when ads have an ideological function, money piles.
In this financially driven world, the consumer, depending on his position, is set back even further thanks to these media studies. Fashion consultant Jean-Jacques Picart says that “for the people who are genuinely obsessed with fashion, it’s a sort of drug. This is a personal theory, but I believe it because they equate exterior change with interior change. They feel that, if they’ve changed their look, they’ve also evolved emotionally” (Tungate 8). Judith Williamson, a writer covering contemporary culture, esays that advertising has “another function, which…in many ways replaces [the roles] traditionally fulfilled by art and religion. It creates structure of meaning” (Bignell 33).
This is precisely why GQ is sold in its current state: the majority of its pages serve as space for ads peddling premium fashion. “From the designed-to attract cover to the lucrative back page advertisement, the GQ reader may in one issue expect to feel confidence, camaraderie, trust, lust, envy, greed, aggression, and control.” Powerful font and sexy use of color are proven methods used to “create an unmistakable air of power and masculinity,” with “black and red virtually becom[ing] part of the branding.” The back page advertisement, in the December 2007 issue of GQ, is perfect evidence of this. It is an ad for the 2008 Cadillac CTS, and the primary colors are red (for the car) and black (for the background), and white for the copy.
Let’s run through a few fly examples from the latest issue of GQ. Early on in the magazine there is an two page advertisement for Rolex, featuring an image of tennis phenomenon Roger Federer readying to slice a backhand towards an unfortunate victim. The ad was promoting the Rolex GMT-Master II, a $9000 timepiece that looks positively homicidal. A few pages later there is a Louis Vuitton insert ad that pitches the flyness of their baggage. The front image features two men, one giving a facetious flick of his hair that is dubious at best. But, omitting that, LV has been steamrolling since the mid 1800’s, and I can personally vouch for their hard sided luggage. Approximately 20 pages later runs an ad that features a man swooping a Chinese model on a high speed train because his $4000 Sony VAIO was baller. I’ve toyed with the VAIO TZ, and it works great, but I use a more durable model. 60 pages later comes a two page insert for the Lexus hybrid motorcars. The pages feature different celebrities from the Green movement, mugging the camera. The ads exude casual, easy style, but also feature an image of a futuristic automobile with all the trimmings. Easygoing cool, but more than willing to shove an immaculate Dunk into the face of some fool as he tries to repent for his blasphemous attempt at racing me. (Yes, the stock specs aren’t extraordinary, but my modifications have transformed that car into a steppin’ razor.) And, towards the end of the magazine, guess who made it on GQ’s Men of the Year list? Roger Federer. I agree. If you’ve ever played tennis, you understand my words. But I start to believe what I read, especially when Tungate writes that “maybe it’s wrong to try and separate fashion magazines from the industry they cover. Fashion is not politics, after all. It’s a relatively small and self-contained community in which stylists, art directors, photographers and editors flit from magazines to advertising campaigns and back again” (Tungate 127).
There is a statement that follows the tune of “go big or go home.” One side begs for the connoisseur who seeks the best in everything he owns. Why deal with anything less than areté? However, this could also be seen as an example of “hypermasculinity –the belief that ideal manhood lies in the exercise of force to dominate others –is the prevalent ideology of manhood in contemporary society. While many of the distinctive characteristics of hypermasculinity (notably those related to warrior culture) pre-date our own century, ideal hypermasculinity is not static” (Burstyn 192). Translation: kings wear crowns, playboys operating in different timezones hand Dunhill cigarettes (one of the ads in Dec 07 GQ) to Parisian Yves-Saint Laurent models at a Corsican beach party.
Tungate is correct when he says that “men who buy GQ are buying into a certain world, just as the women who buy Vogue are buying into that world. Fashion is part of it, but we’re also covering cars, sex food, [and] travel” (166). GQ serves as an aspirational magazine. One issue may have “an article on $500 hand-made shirts made in Paris and a photo spread of Zach Braff wearing $4000 suits,” and another issue (Dec 07) having an article on “Everything you Really Need to Know About: Black Tie,” and Seth Rogen wearing a $1195 track jacket, playing kiddie basketball with a very attractive woman. This pattern doesn’t seem to change very much.
Glossy images of fly products work magic on the mind. Phil Knight, in 1992, told a Harvard Business Review reporter that “the design elements and functional characteristics of the product itself are just part of the overall marketing process.” There is massive appeal to be generated by showing ads depicting comfortable leather chairs, fireplaces, and Turnbury wool houndstooth smoking jacket with silk herringbone pajamas, not to mention Bentley’s Breitling. (Breitling too also received an award in the Best Stuff ’07 list.)Yet, Viljoen writes that GQ’s “cultivated tone is helpful in distinguishing GQ’s brand identity form that of pornography, which is generally not perceived to be part of ‘high culture.’ Secondly, since ‘cultivation’ (being informed) is an asset in corporate culture, a cultivated brand identity may attract readers to GQ who hope to gain cultivation from reading the magazine…It is, thus, not necessary for GQ to be ‘really’ cultivated, whatever this may mean, in order for it to reap the benefits of a cultivated brand identity, it can merely appropriate the gloss of cultivation as it exists in high culture.” Keep in mind that Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Condé Nast in the UK, said that “Vogue and other fashion magazines don’t exist to be overly critical; although they can criticize by exclusion. Our job is to cover trends. The editors themselves choose the clothes they want to present on the editorial pages, and the stylists have considerable room for maneuver. There is no pre-arranged deal in terms of editorial space in return for advertising support. The editors are as keen to show little known designers as they are to cover the big brands. Having said that, it would look pretty strange if we didn’t cover the major designers? It’s what our readers expect of us” (Tungate 127).
Tungate writes that “movies and books are regularly disembowelled with a few strokes of the pen, but the vast percentage of fashion journalism is at best effervescent, at worst fawning. Could it possibly be because magazines need to keep their advertisers sweet? After all, following the frenzied consolidation of the last few years, which saw most of the luxury brands swallowed up by a handful of conglomerates, LVMH, Gucci Group and Richemont fashion advertisers are wealthier and more powerful than ever” (Tungate 126). The rich will get richer, and it will undoubtedly be directly from the pocketbooks of the consumer. GQ shows ads for expensive accoutrements that the vast majority of the world’s population will never own. Yet, that is their job. Viljoen says that “subtlety, discretion, and humor create a sense of dignified, ‘genteel’ responsibility and maturity that seems to recall the Victorian notion of bourgeois masculinity… in this way, GQ functions like a kind of modern-day secret museum, where right of access is restricted to those who can afford, understand it and enjoy it, without supposedly being corrupted by it.” The advertisements in GQ push a lifestyle that consistently focuses on seeing who can be hipper. But ask yourself this: If you could afford to buy a $9000 Rolex, would you?
Arens, William. Contemporary Advertising. McGraw-Hill: New York. 2008.
Tungate, Mark. Fashion Brands : Branding Style from Armani to Zara. GBR: London. 2005
Bignell, Jonathan. Media Semiotics. Manchester University Press. 2002.
Burstyn, Varda. The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport. University of Toronto Press: Toronto. 1999.
Willigan, G. E. (1992). High performance marketing: An interview with Nike's Phil Kinght. Harvard Business Review(July/August), Pages 91-101.
Recently, I was at Inagiku throwing down some sushi and savoring slightly chilled milky sake Sokujō with one of my associates, T.M., A.K.A. The Ghost. We hadn’t spoken in a month or so, so we needed to update each other on our respective maneuvers, ploys, and other news on the front. I was donning a grey two button Hugo Boss jacket, white Purple Label shirt, Tanino Crisci shoes, and a white mechanical IWC Da Vinci Chronograph. T.M. was in a black Dior three button suit, violet Armani shirt, Brioni pocket square, Vuitton sneakers, Robert Evans-eque Chanel shades, and a two tone Rolex GMT Master II. He was obviously going for the look that showed he was young enough to know better, but old enough to be stacking c-notes from different years. On the other hand, my flow was so murderous, it was autopsy. And of course, we had showstopped every sophisticated girl dining at the spot within three minutes of sitting down. These females knew that this brand of style must represent pockets on nothing less than anabolic steroids, and they were correct.This is the kind of style that is sometimes found in real life, but more often found in the pages of Gentlemen’s Quarterly, commonly known as GQ. First published in 1958, the magazine has since begun to focus on a new market of young, loutish yet wealthy male consumers. And, this demographic, along with a plethora of other demographics, are all targets for a formidable predator, the advertising industry.
Exactly how formidable is this predator? For starters, it is estimated that the “amount spent on clothing and footwear around the world tops US$ 1 trillion a year” (Tungate 2). And, according to London-based market research firm Mintel, the global luxury goods market was worth an estimated US$ 87.7 billion in 2005, and is expected to grow by approximately a third in the period to 2010. With that much money on the line, the industry is driven by a “number of highly sophisticated marketing and branding techniques” that help keep cash flowing and bankrolls fat (Tungate 2).
Although there are many different media available to the fashion advertising industry, magazines such as GQ are still maintaining the industry’s attention for a number of reasons. Magazines offer “flexible design options, prestige, authority, believability, and long shelf life. Magazines may sit on a coffee table or shelf for months and be reread many times. People can read a magazine ad at their leisure; they can pore over the details of a photograph; and they can study carefully the information presented in the copy. This makes it an ideal medium for high-involvement think and feel products (Arens 481).
These may be effective primary reasons to spend good money on glossy magazine ads, but the reasons for placing an ad for a $4200 Ebel wristwatch on the 10th page bears heavy scrutiny. And, it turns out that these reasons do not fall far from the academic tree. Media critic Jonathan Bignell, in his seminal work Media Semiotics, writes that “in a consumer society, these real economic differences between people and classes are overlaid with an alternative structure of mythic meanings oriented around buying and owning products (consumption). So according to this critical view ads have an ideological function, since they encourage us to view our consumption positively as an activity which grants us membership of lifestyle groups. But what ads are really doing is serving the interests of those who own and control the industries of consumer culture” (Bignell 39). It is the consumer that keeps profits up, and when ads have an ideological function, money piles.
In this financially driven world, the consumer, depending on his position, is set back even further thanks to these media studies. Fashion consultant Jean-Jacques Picart says that “for the people who are genuinely obsessed with fashion, it’s a sort of drug. This is a personal theory, but I believe it because they equate exterior change with interior change. They feel that, if they’ve changed their look, they’ve also evolved emotionally” (Tungate 8). Judith Williamson, a writer covering contemporary culture, esays that advertising has “another function, which…in many ways replaces [the roles] traditionally fulfilled by art and religion. It creates structure of meaning” (Bignell 33).
This is precisely why GQ is sold in its current state: the majority of its pages serve as space for ads peddling premium fashion. “From the designed-to attract cover to the lucrative back page advertisement, the GQ reader may in one issue expect to feel confidence, camaraderie, trust, lust, envy, greed, aggression, and control.” Powerful font and sexy use of color are proven methods used to “create an unmistakable air of power and masculinity,” with “black and red virtually becom[ing] part of the branding.” The back page advertisement, in the December 2007 issue of GQ, is perfect evidence of this. It is an ad for the 2008 Cadillac CTS, and the primary colors are red (for the car) and black (for the background), and white for the copy.
Let’s run through a few fly examples from the latest issue of GQ. Early on in the magazine there is an two page advertisement for Rolex, featuring an image of tennis phenomenon Roger Federer readying to slice a backhand towards an unfortunate victim. The ad was promoting the Rolex GMT-Master II, a $9000 timepiece that looks positively homicidal. A few pages later there is a Louis Vuitton insert ad that pitches the flyness of their baggage. The front image features two men, one giving a facetious flick of his hair that is dubious at best. But, omitting that, LV has been steamrolling since the mid 1800’s, and I can personally vouch for their hard sided luggage. Approximately 20 pages later runs an ad that features a man swooping a Chinese model on a high speed train because his $4000 Sony VAIO was baller. I’ve toyed with the VAIO TZ, and it works great, but I use a more durable model. 60 pages later comes a two page insert for the Lexus hybrid motorcars. The pages feature different celebrities from the Green movement, mugging the camera. The ads exude casual, easy style, but also feature an image of a futuristic automobile with all the trimmings. Easygoing cool, but more than willing to shove an immaculate Dunk into the face of some fool as he tries to repent for his blasphemous attempt at racing me. (Yes, the stock specs aren’t extraordinary, but my modifications have transformed that car into a steppin’ razor.) And, towards the end of the magazine, guess who made it on GQ’s Men of the Year list? Roger Federer. I agree. If you’ve ever played tennis, you understand my words. But I start to believe what I read, especially when Tungate writes that “maybe it’s wrong to try and separate fashion magazines from the industry they cover. Fashion is not politics, after all. It’s a relatively small and self-contained community in which stylists, art directors, photographers and editors flit from magazines to advertising campaigns and back again” (Tungate 127).
There is a statement that follows the tune of “go big or go home.” One side begs for the connoisseur who seeks the best in everything he owns. Why deal with anything less than areté? However, this could also be seen as an example of “hypermasculinity –the belief that ideal manhood lies in the exercise of force to dominate others –is the prevalent ideology of manhood in contemporary society. While many of the distinctive characteristics of hypermasculinity (notably those related to warrior culture) pre-date our own century, ideal hypermasculinity is not static” (Burstyn 192). Translation: kings wear crowns, playboys operating in different timezones hand Dunhill cigarettes (one of the ads in Dec 07 GQ) to Parisian Yves-Saint Laurent models at a Corsican beach party.
Tungate is correct when he says that “men who buy GQ are buying into a certain world, just as the women who buy Vogue are buying into that world. Fashion is part of it, but we’re also covering cars, sex food, [and] travel” (166). GQ serves as an aspirational magazine. One issue may have “an article on $500 hand-made shirts made in Paris and a photo spread of Zach Braff wearing $4000 suits,” and another issue (Dec 07) having an article on “Everything you Really Need to Know About: Black Tie,” and Seth Rogen wearing a $1195 track jacket, playing kiddie basketball with a very attractive woman. This pattern doesn’t seem to change very much.
Glossy images of fly products work magic on the mind. Phil Knight, in 1992, told a Harvard Business Review reporter that “the design elements and functional characteristics of the product itself are just part of the overall marketing process.” There is massive appeal to be generated by showing ads depicting comfortable leather chairs, fireplaces, and Turnbury wool houndstooth smoking jacket with silk herringbone pajamas, not to mention Bentley’s Breitling. (Breitling too also received an award in the Best Stuff ’07 list.)Yet, Viljoen writes that GQ’s “cultivated tone is helpful in distinguishing GQ’s brand identity form that of pornography, which is generally not perceived to be part of ‘high culture.’ Secondly, since ‘cultivation’ (being informed) is an asset in corporate culture, a cultivated brand identity may attract readers to GQ who hope to gain cultivation from reading the magazine…It is, thus, not necessary for GQ to be ‘really’ cultivated, whatever this may mean, in order for it to reap the benefits of a cultivated brand identity, it can merely appropriate the gloss of cultivation as it exists in high culture.” Keep in mind that Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Condé Nast in the UK, said that “Vogue and other fashion magazines don’t exist to be overly critical; although they can criticize by exclusion. Our job is to cover trends. The editors themselves choose the clothes they want to present on the editorial pages, and the stylists have considerable room for maneuver. There is no pre-arranged deal in terms of editorial space in return for advertising support. The editors are as keen to show little known designers as they are to cover the big brands. Having said that, it would look pretty strange if we didn’t cover the major designers? It’s what our readers expect of us” (Tungate 127).
Tungate writes that “movies and books are regularly disembowelled with a few strokes of the pen, but the vast percentage of fashion journalism is at best effervescent, at worst fawning. Could it possibly be because magazines need to keep their advertisers sweet? After all, following the frenzied consolidation of the last few years, which saw most of the luxury brands swallowed up by a handful of conglomerates, LVMH, Gucci Group and Richemont fashion advertisers are wealthier and more powerful than ever” (Tungate 126). The rich will get richer, and it will undoubtedly be directly from the pocketbooks of the consumer. GQ shows ads for expensive accoutrements that the vast majority of the world’s population will never own. Yet, that is their job. Viljoen says that “subtlety, discretion, and humor create a sense of dignified, ‘genteel’ responsibility and maturity that seems to recall the Victorian notion of bourgeois masculinity… in this way, GQ functions like a kind of modern-day secret museum, where right of access is restricted to those who can afford, understand it and enjoy it, without supposedly being corrupted by it.” The advertisements in GQ push a lifestyle that consistently focuses on seeing who can be hipper. But ask yourself this: If you could afford to buy a $9000 Rolex, would you?
Works Consulted
Arens, William. Contemporary Advertising. McGraw-Hill: New York. 2008.
Tungate, Mark. Fashion Brands : Branding Style from Armani to Zara. GBR: London. 2005
Bignell, Jonathan. Media Semiotics. Manchester University Press. 2002.
Burstyn, Varda. The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport. University of Toronto Press: Toronto. 1999.
Willigan, G. E. (1992). High performance marketing: An interview with Nike's Phil Kinght. Harvard Business Review(July/August), Pages 91-101.
|
jgatsby87 |
Latest page update: made by jgatsby87
, Dec 12 2007, 3:36 AM EST
(about this update
About This Update
Edited by jgatsby87
view changes - complete history) |
|
Keyword tags:
Advertising
Baller
GQ
Magazine
More Info: links to this page
|
There are no threads for this page.
Be the first to start a new thread.
