Album Promotional Poster Analysis - Katy Perry

This is the album promotional poster for the artist, ‘Katy Perry’s’ new album, “One of the Boys”. The layout of this promotional poster is particularly interesting as it follows a semi circular motion. This is more commonly know as the golden ratio theory whereby the layout of the advert is integral. The audience especially if the audience member is a male, will follow this motion of looking at the advert. As theorised by Laura Mulvey and her work on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she stated that the media is produced with the intention of being looked at through the eyes of a male. This advert is no exception to Laura’s theory. The male starts off by gazing at the main image framed to the left of Katy Perry, and then looks at the artists name which is colourful and eye-catching bubble writing, then the next biggest text is “I Kissed A Girl”. This semi circular structure of the promotional poster creates the sexualisation and appeal to a male audience. However on the flipside the poster can have a completely different audience of young girls. This can be linked with the uses and gratification theory, an audience theory which states that the audience is not passive to the media, and depending on their background, culture and ethnicity use the media text which is presented to them in different ways. It suggests that audiences proactively search for media which will be relevant and useful for themselves on a personal level. The media which they choose to absorb will fulfil their specific and personal gratifications. For example if we use the theory to analyse this particular advert it suggests that different audiences will use the advertising promotion in different ways and have different uses to fulfil their different gratifications. For example a teenage male which typically use this media text purely for his sexual pleasure, whereas a 12 year old girl may see this advert typically for the references to childhood for example the paddling pool or the lollypop.

The background of an idealistic garden scene with a paddling pool is representative of childhood and innocence. This can be linked with the theorist, Stuart Hall, with his theory on media texts, encoding and decoding. He states that an institution encodes texts which certain meanings and ‘codes’ which are embedded into the media text are then decoded by an audience. However depending on their background and other factors this decoding may be different the individual. A young girl may see the female image of Katy Perry as someone to aspire to be and to be a role model in their lives whereas a teenage boy may see the image of Katy Perry as a passive sexual desire.

The advert also has an underlying theme of a fairy tale to link in with its audience with a younger audience. For example in the advert the picture of Katy Perry is similar to a 1950’s housewife stereotypical image for example in the “Crabbies Alcoholic Ginger Beer” advert is a recent advert which incorporates a stereotypical housewife. This is similar to the image of Katy Perry which uses an intertexual reference which has a similar demeanour, stance and posture all-encompassing the idea of bringing back the old to advertise the new.