Jamie Keiles is a new high school graduate from Pennsylvania who embarked on a fantastic project: trying to live according to the advice of Seventeen magazine… and blogging about it.

Her insights are many and she’s funny and accessible. The whole blog is worth reading.  And you can check out her new project at Teenagerie.

In this post, however, I wanted to highlight her analysis of the ad content of the June/July 2010 issue. She writes:

Magazines profit from ad sales more than they do from newsstand sales or subscriptions. From a business standpoint, the essential purpose of magazines (or television, or radio) is to round up a group of similarly demographic’d consumers that advertisers can easily target. I figured that the advertising content might have something to say about what the average Seventeen reader is imagined to be like. In the 171 page issue, there were 91 ad spaces. Here is how the content broke down:

So… mostly, as Jamie puts it, “stuff that makes you look better.” Jamie then broke it down by advertisements for products and ones for experiences:

She ponders:

I’m not heading toward any sort of conclusive argument with these graphs. Just thought it was an interesting exercise to explore how low the bar is set for Seventeen readers when it comes to what advertisers think will interest them. Products advertised definitely skew more toward tangible than experiential, and more toward short-term use than long-term investment. It would be interesting to do a similar data sample with the Economist or the New York Times. Wonder if this way of thinking is something that applies to all demographics, or mostly just teens.