Interpretation and influence of television alcohol advertisements on consumption considerations by youth in Elim, Limpopo: A reception analysis
Muleya, Tshimangadzo Elea
This is a reception study, which explores and evaluates, through in-depth interviews
and surveys, how television audiences or consumers interpret alcohol advertisements.
The aim is to understand the influence of the genre of television advertising on
perceptions around alcohol consumption by youth at Elim community in Limpopo,
South Africa. This study attempts to provide additional analysis of the ways alcohol
television advertisements are decoded by young people. Particular attention is paid to
review alcohol use and its importance in African societies, gender differences in
alcohol use and interpretation, and the exposure and reception of alcohol television
avdertising messages. The paper utilises the encoding and decoding model together
with other mass communication theories. The study takes a mixed method
sequentially dependent approach, and both the quantitative and qualitative methods
are used. Survey and in-depth interviews were utilised, principally employing random
and purposive sampling techniques to select 600 respondents (young people between
the ages of 18-35) for quantitative analysis, and 10 respondents for qualitative
analysis, respectively. Findings indicate that although alcohol has a symbolic meaning
and is culturally central or embedded in African cultural systems, young people at Elim
decode alcohol advertisements in ironic and inexplicable ways that can hardly be
predicted by the encoders of media messages. This study also found that there are
differences in how the social and gender stereotypical depictions in the sampled
advertisements are received by audiences, who seem to hold a certain stereotypical
position when reading media messages and who take the dominant position when an
advertisement reinforces certain gender stereotypes they agree with. When certain
stereotypes are challenged, there is ‘discomfort’ and audiences argue against the
preferred reading. The study concludes by suggesting that the television medium’s
power is limited, and that there is no guarantee that the preferred meaning encoded
in an advertisement will become the preferred reading. In essence, much of Stuart
Hall’s theoretical propositions around how audiences decode media texts are notably
reinforced in this study; thus, emphasising the relevance of this theory, decades after
it was first introduced.
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