Catering to Different Ethnic Groups.

• Position: Research on advertising - Brief Article

It has been known for years that advertising does more than sell products. Commercials and print ads also reflect people's roles and attitudes and define society's expectations of those roles. Tara L. McLaughlin, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis (Mo.), has found that those ads can differ significantly between publications targeted at African-Americans and those read by Caucasians.

She examined Cosmopolitan, Us, and People, which target primarily white readers, and the black-oriented publications Essence and Ebony, analyzing more than 200 advertisements using a system developed in the 1970s by social psychologist Erving Goffman.

"Goffman believed advertisements convey cultural messages about men and women in very subtle ways," McLaughlin explains. "The positioning of the hands, the relative sizes of models, and the ways people are placed in advertisements can expose the viewer to all sorts of messages regarding power and relationships between men and women." He used six categories to explore how advertising can deliver its messages:

* Relative size, when one person in the frame appears larger or taller than another, since size conveys information about the social authority of individuals in an ad.

* Feminine touch, as when a person in an ad uses his or her fingers or hands to caress or cradle an object, since this touch conveys the idea of delicacy.

* Function ranking conveys the social importance of the people in an ad by showing one person in an authoritative or managerial role over another.

* Ritualization of subordination conveys information about power in gender relationships. In this category, a person--usually a woman--is seen lying on a floor or bed and cowering or assuming a submissive or silly posture.

* Licensed withdrawal, when a person in an ad seems psychologically removed from the situation shown.

* Family, because the ways it is...