What Women (and Men) Want: Magazine Ad Copy by Sex

A few weeks ago, I came up with the idea for a project where I would go through a token men's magazine (like Esquire) and women's magazine (like Cosmopolitan), transcribe all the copy in their ads, and then use a PHP script to dive into that copy and cull out the most recurring words.

So I decided to go ahead with the idea using those magazines. A couple of ground rules on the copy: I didn't input company product names alone (only if they were in the copy itself or in a call-to-action), and I didn't include ads for prescription medicines. They had so much copy that they would have heavily skewed the results. Here's the raw text, if you want to take a look: Esquire Cosmopolitan

Also, the script I wrote actually turned out to be a pretty cool tool. I call it okurensis, a play on the word "occurrences". You can try it out here. It scans the text in question to remove various punctuations (leaves constructions like "can't" alone), and then goes back through the text and combs out "noise words" like "a", "an", "because", etc. -- basically the same kinds of words that Google combs out when you're searching for something. It then checks how many times each word occurs in the full body of copy, and then sorts all these words into a list going from greatest to least. It is then formatted in accordance with how many times they occur relative to the most and least occurring words.

So, without further ado the results appear below:

occurrence of ads throughout the mag

Esquire clocks in at 172 pages, including both covers. With 36 full page ads, this translates into about 1 ad page per 4.78 magazine pages, or, about 21% of the magazine (as a comparison, magazines typically try to clock in at about 60% or so when it comes to ad copy vs. magazine copy).

Cosmopolitan, on the other hand, is a bit denser (same thickness, cheaper paper), weighing in at 240 pages. On top of this, its ad penetration is 1 ad page for every 3.2 copy pages, or about 31% of the magazine. Given its higher page count, this translates into substantially more ad copy than in the issue of Esquire. Still, it should be noted that it's barely even hitting the halfway mark in terms of its 60% baseline.

20 most occurring words -- men

BEST 11 APPEARANCES
WHEN 8 APPEARANCES
NEW 8 APPEARANCES
EVER 7 APPEARANCES
TIME 7 APPEARANCES
NOISE 6 APPEARANCES
TECHNOLOGY 6 APPEARANCES
WORLD 6 APPEARANCES
SINGLE 5 APPEARANCES
INTRODUCING 5 APPEARANCES
SO 5 APPEARANCES
YEAR 5 APPEARANCES
JUST 5 APPEARANCES
COMES 5 APPEARANCES
WHEEL 5 APPEARANCES
EXPERIENCE 5 APPEARANCES
2008 4 APPEARANCES
WORLD'S 4 APPEARANCES
DRIVE 4 APPEARANCES
US 4 APPEARANCES


20 most occurring words -- women

SKIN 37 APPEARANCES
NEW 22 APPEARANCES
COLOR 15 APPEARANCES
FEEL 15 APPEARANCES
DAY 14 APPEARANCES
SO 14 APPEARANCES
LOVE 12 APPEARANCES
FRAGRANCE 9 APPEARANCES
BEST 9 APPEARANCES
ONE 9 APPEARANCES
EVERY 9 APPEARANCES
BODY 9 APPEARANCES
STYLE 9 APPEARANCES
YOU'RE 9 APPEARANCES
SMOOTH 8 APPEARANCES
MOISTURE 8 APPEARANCES
ITS 8 APPEARANCES
COM 8 APPEARANCES
WINTER 8 APPEARANCES
JUST 8 APPEARANCES
LITTLE 7 APPEARANCES


While I'm going to let those results speak for themselves, I think it's fair to at least say that they are surprisingly in line with what we might expect to see in terms of the top occurring words in their respective magazines.

I thought these next bits of data might be interesting to compare. I took the top 10 words from each of the magazines, and compared them to how often they occurred in the other magazine. The results are surprisingly stereotypical.

number of occurrences of men's top 10 in the women's copy

BEST 9 APPEARANCES
WHEN 6 APPEARANCES
NEW 22 APPEARANCES
EVER 0 APPEARANCES
TIME 4 APPEARANCES
NOISE 0 APPEARANCES
TECHNOLOGY 1 APPEARANCE
WORLD 0 APPEARANCES
SINGLE 0 APPEARANCES
INTRODUCING 0 APPEARANCES


number of occurrences of women's top 10 in the men's copy

SKIN 1 APPEARANCE
NEW 8 APPEARANCES
COLOR 0 APPEARANCES
FEEL 0 APPEARANCES
DAY 0 APPEARANCES
LOVE 0 APPEARANCES
FRAGRANCE 2 APPEARANCES
BEST 11 APPEARANCES
ONE 3 APPEARANCES
EVERY 3 APPEARANCES


As you can see, many more of the men's more prominent words appear higher up the list of the women's magazine. One could deduce from this that the women's products reach a bit more across the sex line. However, when you look at how the women's top 10 words fared in the men's copy, it's quite pale in comparison. "Skin," for instance, is the women's top keyword, but in the men's magazine, it appears among the bottom. Words you would associate heavily with femininity like "color," "feel" and "love" don't even appear at all in the men's magazine.

While, to an extent, I didn't expect to see many of these words appear in the men's magazine, just based on pure generalization, these results were quite profoundly telling of what magazine copy writers believe men expect to see in ad copy. It's the kind of bare observation that you'd expect to hear from a stand-up comedian, only it's actual hard data.

differences in actual copy

While going through these magazines, and transcribing the text, I couldn't help but notice that the women's magazine ads seemed much more verbose (translation: a lot more arduous to transcribe). So, to test this, I went back, took the number of words I transcribed and divided it by the number of ads in that magazine.

Esquire: 42.94 words per ad
Cosmopolitan: 41.30 words per ad

Needless to say, this was a bit of surprise. While the raw numbers show that the Cosmopolitan has almost exactly twice as many words as the issue of Esquire (E:1,546, C:3,098), the Cosmo also has about twice as many ads.

conclusion

Advertising is a strange animal. On the one hand, a person could argue that people who write ad copy are professionals at selling, and are merely writing in a way that will compel the reader to purchase said product, or end up with more positive outlook on that product.

On the other, it would also be easy to argue that perhaps advertising companies only [i]think[/i] they know what people want to hear about a product to compel them to purchase it. It's this separation of perception vs. reality that many media critics point to when it comes to how media outlets portray the ideal man or woman.

If these keywords are any indication, every woman wants perfect skin. They love color, love and scents. They like smooth. They like moisturized. Their body is important to them.

On the other end of the spectrum, every man wants the "best." They also want the newest thing, are worldly and technologically adept. They are mature and time-tested, and desire performance, quality and efficiency. They also crave to be more "European," and appreciate style and luxury.

You can see now why traditional styles of media and advertising are starting to die away. They're built on a lot of assumptions. When there were only a few ways of getting your leisure or news reading, you took what they gave you and were told what the contemporary man or woman was like.

But things have changed. The web has empowered the niche, and now, with cookies, tracking and search technology, ads are directed to people who are a whole lot more like [i]you[/i]. It's no wonder, then, why people, who generally respond well to advertising that they deem relatable, act more on advertising on the web, when a greater percentage of it is targeted more directly at them, personally.

If you have any questions about my method or my findings, feel free to contact me.