Interpretation and influence of television alcohol advertisements on consumption considerations by youth in Elim, Limpopo: A reception analysis

Abstract

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.