On Target: The Migration of Print Advertisements from People to the New Yorker

This article presents a multimodal analysis of an interesting case of genre migration. On August 22, 2005, for the first time in the 80-year history of The New Yorker, a single advertiser –the Target discount store chain-- sponsored an entire issue of the quintessential magazine for American cultural elites. Although many mainstream magazines had published “single-sponsored issues” before, and Target had been the sole sponsor of an issue of People magazine, the audacity of this advertising/editorial collaboration turned this marketing ploy into a shocking event. In fact, from its inception in the early 20th century, the medium of advertising has traditionally embraced a wide cross-class mass of customers. The “elites” –in the sense of a lifestyle grouping or market segment-- have rarely been the main, let alone the sole, target of the advertising campaigns of corporate giants. Starting from these premises, using the methodological tools of visual semiotics and multimodal communication (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, 2001), and with reference to the evaluative function of persuasive texts as proposed by Susan Hunston (1999), first of all, I examine the main characteristics of the visual design of some of the Target print ads from the August 22, 2005 issue of The New Yorker. Then, I analyze the transformation of the genre of printed advertisements when it migrates from a mainstream magazine such as People to a magazine that targets the cultural elites.