The emotions industry celebrities and self-confession as a marketing strategy

This chapter focuses on identifying and analyzing emotional expressions conveyed by the media whose purpose is to market celebrities by means of entertainment magazines. To accomplish this, an attempt is made to decode the emotional disclosure discourse accompanying Israel's celeb culture by analyzing the front covers of an Israeli entertainment magazine, "Pnay +". Furthermore, since one way of creating effective bonds between cultural consumers and "cultural products" is through emotional disclosures, it is important to understand the emotional processes that these "products" (i.e., Israeli celebrities) experience. Turning celebs into memotions industry is made possible through double-faceted emotional disclosures: on the one hand, they focus on such topics as self-realization or the search for love, relationships, marriage and family. On the other hand, as opposed to the search for happiness, emotional marketing strategies tend to focus on celebs' anxieties, struggles against emotional breakdown and depression, and rude awakening from the dream of stardom due to the price of fame. In fact, a combination of these two opposing aspects covers the whole spectrum of human emotions. As a result, portraying celebs as experiencing pinnacles of euphoria alongside depths of despair transforms them into ordinary people. The significance of this is that the emotions industry acts to minimize the emotional gap between the celebrity as a cultural generator and the reader as cultural consumer, thus turning emotional disclosure into a cultural product.