The advertisements of Dietary Supplement in a panel of 6 Italian magazines: a quantitative analysis

The purpose of the research is to trace the evolution of the advertisements used for advertising dietary supplement products in Italian magazines, sorting the advertisements by year, target and reference season. Based on the research con- ducted by Charlotte A. Pratt and Cornelius B. Pratt (1995), revised and adapted to the Italian food context, we designed a matrix of 497 advertisements, which were selected based on the analysis of 67,340 advertisements and using the ref- erence to the dietary supplement sector as a discriminator. The advertisements were extrapolated from a sample of 6 Italian magazines to determine the extent to which the various demographic groups in Italy are exposed to printed advertising for dietary supplements. We examined the frequency of the relevant advertising forms over a period of 4 years, from January 2014 to December 2017. The results show that the advertising related to dietary supplements show a strong vocation to gender in advertising, underlining different trends for the different panels ana- lysed. The historical trend turns out to be very different over the various years of analysis; the same thing can be observed among the seasons analysed. This study introduces the trends and dynamics of the Italian printed advertising for dietary supplements to the relevant scientific literature; this research has further implica- tions and gives further contributions to the existing studies, since it aims to high- light the role of integrators in new consumption models; last, but not least, the re- search also provides important insights to various socio-economical stakeholders.