Michelle Sartor
Signaling in Cable Television Commercials
While in the course Media Industries, I wrote a paper about signaling in which I analyzed an hour's worth of commercials that aired during the same weekday hour on Music Television (MTV) and the Cable News Network (CNN), two very different cable television networks. According to scholar Joseph Turow, "Signaling involves the creation of media materials in ways that indicate to certain types of people that they ought to be part of the audience and to other populations that they do not belong." Through my observations, I learned that commercials can be a great indicator of the target audience. By analyzing the commercials, I not only gained a better understanding of signaling, but I also learned about content analysis and how to code the commercials according to certain criteria.
