My content analysis study done on commercials played during the NBA and WNBA

Title: The content of the commercials were not too different and are both quite alike in coding.


Two-sentence summary of findings: Based on the demographics which was practically 50/50 of both genders for the NBA and the WNBA, there was similar findings during both games which was a domination of whites in commercials and the audience it’s geared towards is mostly high school and college ages (17-23.)


Summary of previous study: The previous study by Carol J. Pardun and Kathy Roberts Forde (“Sexual Content of Television Commercials Watched by Early Adolescents” in Sex in consumer culture: The erotic content of media and marketing) reveals the types of sexual imagery found in television commercials based on race or gender that young adolescents watch regularly on television programs. As a result of this study, the majority percentage (58%) of sexual imagery in the commercials sampled and coded concerned women while 37.5% focused primarily on men, and 12.6% was both genders equally being portrayed.


Its most important foundation literature and how it relates to your own project: The most significant study that helped me code my own study was the work by Pingree, S. Hawkins, R.P Butler, and W. Paisley (“A scale for sexism. Journal of Communication.” 1976.) where there were three categories modified from a sex-role scale developed by Pingree. These categories: decorative, traditional, and progressive helped me code how the male or female, sometimes both, were being portrayed in the commercial. To be defined as “decorative,” the person(s) in the commercial had to be non-verbal and not really making an effort to sell the product like dancing or just did not play a big role and blended in with the background while a bigger object (perhaps a car) was the main focus. “Traditional” was a general stereotype that usually portrays men and women, like boys playing sports and moms cleaning the kitchen. “Progressive” was slightly tricky. It’s difficult to try to fit such a wide range of commercials into 3 narrow categories. For “progressive,” the person(s) in the commercial had to have had a sense of visual and role-playing equality between the male(s) and female(s) as well as a leadership role or a role played actively to express the use and efficiency of the product.

Corpus and method: My corpus consists of commercials during a span of a quarter (which included 10 commercials) during an NBA and an WNBA game. I set up some guidelines to follow by before starting research on the data found because commercials are made so differently from one another that guidelines will help me have a consistent study. I omitted commercials of products that did not include people in them and also coded each commercial based on the main characters and main focus in case there were hundreds of people in a commercial. I also did not include coding clothing in my research. I was surprised myself to realize I actually did not need it. Every commercial was classified as demure or even casual. None of the commercials were considered partially clad or seductive. There was sexual imagery portrayed in other ways, like a girl’s seductive overvoice for selling Heinekeen in one of the commercials. Although of course, there’s sexual imagery or implications in almost everything we see today, I realize that also includes the commercials my study includes, yet none of them were provocative enough where I found it necessary to code the clothing worn. However, like I said earlier, there are other ways of portraying sex into advertisements; ways that aren’t so clear-cut and are more obscure. The method used was qualitative and quantitative analysis. I first identified how many main characters there were and then classified them by race and gender. Then, I coded them for their role-playing attributes based on overall whether they were decorative, traditional, or progressive. I also used descriptive analysis to identify more information that could not be processed by merely coding practices.


Findings: Before, I could really compare and contrast my findings I found the demographics for both the NBA and the WNBA on their websites.
For the NBA:
- 77.5% of NBA fans are 21 or older.
- 84% of fans who watch NBA on TV are 21 or older
- 55% of fans are males
- 45% of fans are females
- 77% of fans are teenagers
- 15% Latinos
- 36% African Americans

For the WNBA:
- significant growth in female demographics
- fans in arena are 78% female
- TV fans are divided equally between male and female
- Median age is 33 with 28% age 17 and younger
- 5% Latinos
- 24% African Americans

Majority of commercials had actors/actresses that were white and males. Surprisingly, there were no Latinos except for two men during the WNBA game. There wasn’t nearly enough African Americans represented in the commercials based on the percentage they make up of fans of the NBA. There was only 6 blacks shown in commercials during the NBA game, and at that 4 were in the same commercial. No Asian males in commercials. In fact, it’s interesting that there are not many Asians in commercials since according to NBA’s marketing team, their fastest growing fan-market are Asians. Majority of commercials had traditional roles played on both sides of gender. Interestingly enough, based on the demographics the commercials were accurate since most were geared towards high school/college audience.



Conclusions: In general, based on my descriptive analysis, commercials for male audience were well done with celebrity appearances or packed with humor whereas commercials mostly for women were more informative than anything else and were ridiculously less entertaining and lacked the laugh- and shock-factor. Also, women and especially other races need to be represented more in commercials. Based, on the demographics, the representation in commercials and the people watching is imbalanced and needs to be fixed. I see that there are surprisingly more “progressive” roles being played by both men and women yet “traditional” roles were the bulk of commercials for both genders. If an extended study was to be done, I believe there would be more apparent findings that could be discovered that would be extremely interesting but since this is based off of 20 commercials in total, it was considerably more difficult to find shocking statistics that would make it feasible to make a generalization on the differences in commercials being played during an NBA and WNBA game.