Reflection of gender roles on the advertising contents produced by Instagram phenomenes

Today, brands tend to use social media platforms as a marketing and advertising tool to communicate with brand awareness and target audiences. Instagram is one of the most popular and fastest growing platforms used by brands. Instagram has created a new type of celebrity called 'Phenomenon / Micro Vowel'. The content produced by social media and social media phenomena represents the digital advertising and marketing environment of the future. Phenomena are opinion leaders of social media. Brands collaborate with Instagram phenomena to present their products and services through sincere and engaging social media content and to create the desired effect on the target audience. While establishing the cooperation, the importance of the phenomenon, the number of follow-up and comments are important for the domain, while the fact that the phenomenon is reliable, popular and appropriate to the brand personality is important for the purposes of the message to be conveyed. Phenomena are the most common ways to produce advertising content on Instagram; giving advice, product placement and discount code. In this study, the content of advertising produced by the phenomena was examined in terms of gender roles and gender representations by content analysis method. Previous studies dealing with gender representations and gender roles in commercials have mostly focused on advertising in traditional media. In addition, there are no studies dealing with social media advertisements and phenomena in this respect. The research was carried out to explore gender roles and gender representations of women on social media. This thesis will argue that in parallel with previous research, gender roles and gender representations also take place in social media. However, although the study reveals meaningful differences, it has not been able to detect as big differences as the studies conducted by considering traditional advertising channels. This shows that social media does not reinforce gender differences and gender roles by reproducing them as much as in other media. In terms of gender roles, it is observed that the society is getting rid of the patterns attributed to individuals. This is explained by the theory of performativity of gender roles. Key Words: Instagram, Social Media, Gender, Advertising, Phenomenon