Svensk reklam och dess modelläsare

Sammanfattning: This thesis deals with model readers in contemporary Swedish magazine advertising texts aimed at different target groups: children (aged 7–12), teenagers (13–19), and adults (20–29) of both genders. The model reader is the presupposed reader of the text, realised in the text itself and not identical with the empirical reader, who is anyone reading the text.The study takes the consumer culture of late modernity and the gender system as its point of departure. The model readers are regarded as socially motivated mass mediated identities that are offered to the empirical readers of the advertisements. Through the theoretical assumptions of social semiotics and critical discourse analysis, the model readers are, on the one hand, treated as textual realisations of the consumer culture and the gender system and, on the other, as varying with respect to target group.A total of 14 advertisements, selected according to the age and gender of the target groups, are analysed. The texts are multimodal; the copy combines with the images, graphics, colours etc. to create meaning. A qualitative model for analysis was developed and applied both to the copy and to other visual representations in the texts. This model allows an analysis of the construction of the model reader at different levels in the text. The textual composition of the ads as well as ideational and interpersonal meanings are analysed along with intertextual and extratextual presuppositions.One of the main findings of the study is that the model readers in the ads with male target groups tend to relate to a reproductive type of consumption, where an already successful model reader reproduces success, activity and leadership through consumption of the advertised products. The model readers in ads with female target groups tend to be more concerned with looks and the female body, and are not as successful or leadership-oriented. They also relate to a pretentious type of consumption, where the product is needed to adjust or improve the identity of the model reader. A gender system in which masculinity is superior and femininity inferior can thus be traced in the advertisements analysed. Another result is that more traditional, often more person and product-oriented, advertising formats are found in the ads with older target groups whereas more collage-oriented, or intertextual, formats are found in the ads with younger target groups.