THE IMAGE OF MIDDLE-AGED AND OLDER WOMEN IN MAGAZINE ADVERTISEMENTS

Manufacturers and retailers have discovered the potential ''older'' market, but do magazine ads reflect this discovery? The images of older women in advertisements in 1987 issues of Good Housekeeping, JAMA, and Time were examined on several measures. Good Housekeeping printed more ads featuring women, and a greater proportion of its ''person pictorial'' ads featured women. An age bias was found in the frequency of depiction of older women in ads. Only 10% of women in ads were older women, and 52% of ads with older women appeared in JAMA; 39% of women in ads were middle-aged, and they were equally distributed across the three publications. The ages of women in ads for different kinds of products and the settings in which they appeared varied. The appearance of women in ads also varied by publication; women were shown less positively in JAMA ads. The findings for 1987 are compared with a similar study of ads in 1977.