Heat Magazine

My favourite weekly celebrity gossip magazine is Heat magazine. It sells 417,163 copies each week. If you take me out that leaves 417,162 other people sharing my favourite magazine. However this doesn’t include the sharing of the magazine, one per household, which does lead to spoilers but that is expected.

Heat Magazine march 2012
http://www.heatworld.com/Fun-Stuff/2012/03/Whats-in-this-weeks-heat-magazine/ 

First issue of Heat Magazine 1999
http://cdn-5.create.net/siteimages/5/5/8/55872/480868/f_431267.jpg

I was shocked to learn Heat magazine wasn’t always this successful, when it was first released in 1999, Heat wasn’t a gossip magazine, it was a general entertainment magazine with sales under 70,000. Bauer media put Heat magazine under a series of revamps to change Heat magazines target audience to 16-35 year old females.

I fit this target audience perfectly; I started reading Heat magazine when I was 16, just through coincidence, buying it on a long car journey and haven’t missed an issue since. The revamps included more information on the “hottest” celebrities, their love life, their latest movies/television programmes and fashion statements to fulfil our inner desires. This fits our 3-minute culture perfectly. Moving from one celebrity to another, fitting in 50 or more celebrities into each issue, means our focus is constantly changed stimulating our desires within the same magazine.  

Promise of 50 different celebrities within the first few pages
http://www.heatworld.com/images/107728_615x10000_STD/2012/2/COVER-666-x.jpg 

Changing the target audience prompts a lot of feminist questions. Why did Bauer media think their magazine would be more successful with a female audience? One explanation could be to do with Laura Mulvey’s idea of  “the Male Gaze”; it makes it very easy to find a focal point that will sell to all women: fashion. I always find myself looking at the celebrities’ outfits even during the main stories, judging them deciding what will look good on me. Which is why I find the Style Clinic so exciting. Here you can ask where to find the outfit if it isn’t already listed perfect.  

Laura Mulvey
http://www.amoeba.com/blog/2010/07/writings-from-the-holy-texan/bob-hope-and-the-feminine-spectacle.html

Heat magazine always aberrantly decodes images of celebrities. It’s this kind of humour that makes Heat magazine more appealing to me. You get a small 3-6 word aberrantly decoded version of the image put in the corner (look below) and then the real details in a paragraph to anchor the image. I like this text because it highlights the mistakes celebrities can make in photos just like I do for example. We see the wrong facial expression at the wrong time or slipping at the exact moment the shutter closes, leaving an embarrassing image captured forever (or until its deleted through much protest), whereas celebrities don't have this luxury and the image ends up everywhere through the media. It relates us to the ordinary aspect of the celebrities until they show us an image of their new “pad” and we are shocked back to the proletarian status we are part of.

example of aberrant decoding

http://www.realwire.com/writeitfiles/heat%20radio%20logo.JPG

http://www.athriftymrs.com/2011/04/catwalk-style-on-budget.html

In fact the only thing I don’t like about Heat Magazine is the fact that it has been allowed to expand due to consumerism to a radio station and website and now through our post-modern society it is on social networks. This is due to spoilers. I know it allows me to have more information but I don’t want it. I love sitting down with a cup of tea and reading the magazine on a Thursday afternoon (am I the only one?). This is why my following of Heat on Twitter only lasted one day. There are only so many times you can read the same celebrity story and that is why we usually limit ourselves to one weekly magazine. This again refers to our postmodern culture; we get bored and need a new story every few days at least.

Heat's Twitter page
http://www.metcalfesfood.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Heat-World-Twitter-19.08.111.png

Lucky Strike packet
http://www.denbompa.be/illustration/lucky-strike-1959/

I went on holiday to Italy in the summer of 2011 and found Heat magazine (admittedly the previous week's edition, but it was still there) in the local shop. It was only then that I released that Heat was global cultural product even though its offices are in England. I found on the barcode it says the countries and relevant prices. It turns out Heat is sold in 6 countries as well as the UK. This shows how much other cultures idealize the same celebrities. 

It shows how absorbed I am in the celebrity gossip that I didn’t even research into the magazine I have been buying for 2 years up until now. This is what Theodor Adorno was recognizing; we are so washed with consumerism and capitalism that we overlook how the bourgeoisie are exploiting us. This is clearly a Marxist concept (if you want to know more read Bennett and Slater’s 'Communication and Culture: the essential introduction'). We then become very easy targets for people like Edward Bernays who ran the Lucky Strike campaign.  

More! Magazine front cover

Closer Magazine front cover

Through my few and a bit years of buying heat magazine I have received many promotional deals. The give me another one of Bauer Media's weekly celebrity magazines such as Closer and More! and I have found through these magazine deals that they share several of the same stories, but then they go into different things such as “real life stories” (which all seem a bit ridiculous to me). This shows that the celebrities have turned themselves into commodities selling themselves to the magazines.

Heat completely caters for its audience. If the magazine is too large for you to read then you just head to www.heatworld.com/video/ this shows loads of extras as well as clips they have referenced in the magazine, such as the one of Tom Daley dancing to LMFAO’s I’m sexy and I know it. All these clips are celebrity interviews or the latest project released by the celebrity. This is how we are “entertained to death” as Neil Postman says, meaning that the videos we are watching are completely sucking us in, stopping us from doing other things (I can confirm this as I have spent the last 15 minutes watching videos rather than writing this) and is damaging to us.



Celebrity Juice's photo shoot for Heat magazine
http://static.tellymix.co.uk/files/2011/10/Celebrity-Juice-Heat.jpg

Heat also conducts exclusive interviews with celebrities. These are the parts I tend to skip unless they include people I like (I loved the one with the Celebrity Juice “gang”), because half the time I don’t know who they are, showing that their celebrity status is very low. However I bet many people don’t know that there is an interview in the last few pages of the magazine. This is because Heat tries to put all 126 pages to full use; compared to other celebrity gossip magazines Heat has very few advertisement pages, even though it comes out in full force for the fashion pages. On each fashion page there is an image of the celebrity and then all around them are the cheaper versions of the items and where to get them to pull off a similar look. Similar and cheaper because Heat knows we aspire to be like our favourite celebrities but we will never achieve it, we can’t even get the same clothes, let alone lifestyle.

one of Heat magazines style pages
http://www.globalcool.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/5aecb_Heat12thOct-723x1024.jpg

So even now that I know Heat magazine (or should I say Bauer Media) is exploiting me it’s not going to stop me from purchasing it weekly.  They have found my inner desire to be a celebrity and have created a product showing me that my role models are similar to me, creating this weekly object of desire. They have succeeded over the other magazines by their mode of address making it informal and personal, adding humour in to relax me and make me oblivious to their exploitation. That’s why I need a mid-week break, an hour or so of relaxation satisfying a desire before returning to my world of waitressing and college work. That is why I will continue to buy Heat weekly.