Has the use of body image in advertising changed in the first two decades of the new century?

Abstract

The human body is a powerful advertising tool that portrays changing messages according to social trends and expectations. Sport advertisements in particular offer many opportunities to study these changes. The aim of this study was to analyze changes in body image portrayal in printed sports magazine advertisements over the last two decades. We used a purpose-designed observation instrument (OSBI) to analyze 221 body images in sports magazine advertisements from 2008 to 2018. We then performed T-pattern analysis (TPA) to compare the 2 periods as TPA is a suitable technique for analyzing the motor activities. Our results showed that advertisements from both periods featured mostly young, muscular, athletic men wearing sports attire. Women appeared more frequently in 2018 and showed a more dynamic body attitude. Other changes detected for 2018 were a greater presence of sports idols, facial mood expressions, and technological devices. We consider that this research demonstrates a unique, new application of TPA since we did not focus on behaviors from a single time dimension, but on a continuous chain of body images portrayed in sports magazine advertisements. The OSBI observation instrument used to record details of body image sequences provided objective evidence to help answer our research question.