Post 12: Audiences

Audience

What is an audience?

·         A collective group of people who consume media text such as by watching films.

·         The most important question when writing a script is ‘does it have an audience?’

Types of audiences 

·         Mass audience – ‘broadcast audience’ who consume mainstream or popular texts such as soaps. Target a large group of peoples

·         Niche – much smaller but influential – small select group of people with a unique interest

Why are audiences important?

·         Without them there would be no media. They create media to make profit and without them there would be no profit.

·         The mass media is becoming more competitive and are increasingly fighting over audiences

Katz and Blumler 

·         1. Information – finding out about events, satisfying curiosity and giving a sense of security through knowledge

·         Personal identity – reinforcement for personal values, finding model behaviour. Insight into oneself

·         Integration and social interaction – insight into circumstances of others, identifying with others and giving a sense of belonging. 

Impact of new technology on Audiences

·         Old media – (TV, print, radio) use to have high audience viewers, now has to work hard to gain

·         Digital technology – led to uncertainty over how to define ‘audience’ although they are agree to be ‘fragmented’

Fragmented audiences

·         Audience into smaller groups due to variety of different media

·         Newspapers are struggling – online copies

·         DVD sales have dropped – pirated copies, online, downloads

·         Large institutions are losing profit

How do institutions still make money?

·         Free apps always have ads

·         Websites and search engines always have adverts targeting users especially when they’re free websites

·         Newspapers are printing less copies and are switching to online distribution – can lower distribution costs

Audience categories

·         Can be divided into categories based on social class/grade

Audience research

·         Major part of any media company.

·         Questionnaires, focus groups, pre-film screening and spending time and money finding out who would be interested in their product.

Demographics

·         Media products interested in

·         Income/status

·         Age

·         Gender

·         Race

·         Location of potential audience. When they know this they can start to shape their media text to a group with known viewing habits

Psychographics

·         Create a text that targets a particular audience – interests, hobbies, tastes, etc.

·         Their product has to appeal to a certain audience so the advertisers pay to promote their product

·         Most can define their typical audience member often with a psychographic profile

Audience categories

Group A

·         Lawyers

·         Doctors

·         Scientists

·         Well paid professionals

Group B

·         Teachers

·         Middle management

·         Fairly well paid pros

Group C1

·         Junior management

·         Bank clerks

·         Nurses

·         ‘white collar’ pros

Group C2

·         Electricians

·         Plumbers

·         Carpenters

·         ‘blue collar’ pros

Group D

·         Manual workers such as

·         Drivers

·         Post sorters

Group E

·         Students

·         Unemployed

·         Pensioner

Stuart Hall – theorist

·         Views audiences as both the producers and consumers of texts. Analysing the initial meaning of the text. His approach is that the consumer actively negotiates the meaning.

New Media

·         New tool to get instant access to people

·         Facebook and other social network sites – ‘likes’

·         Online forums

·         Twitter trends

·         Views on YouTube & Google +1

Research

·         Quantitative research

·         E.g. questionnaires

·         Number based

·         Closed questions to generate exact answers

·         Very factual

·         Qualitative research

·         E.g. interviews and focus groups

·         Analysis of existing products

·         Open questions to generate answers open to interpretation

·         Individual preferences

Audience engagement

·         Describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways

Audience expectations

·         The ideas the audience have in advance of seeing the media text. Particularly applies to genre.  Producers continually play with audiences expectations

Audience foreknowledge

·         Definitive information that audiences bring to a media product

Audience identification

·         The way an audience feel themselves connected to a particular media text – they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle.

Audience placement

·         Range of strategies media producers use to directly target a particular audience and make them feel the text is ‘particularly for them’ 

Audience research

·         Measuring an audience is important to all media institutions research is done at all stages and once produced audience will be continually monitored