Category: Newspapers and Magazines

Constructing Audience

When a media text is being planned, perhaps the most important question the producers consider is “Does it have an audience?” If the answer to this is ‘no’, then there is no point in going any further. If no one is going to watch/read/play/buy the text, the producers aren’t going to make any money or get their message across. Audience research is a major part of any media company’s work. They use questionnaires, focus groups, and comparisons to existing media texts, and spend a great deal of time and money finding out if there is anyone out there who might be interested in their idea.

It’s a serious business; media producers basically want to know the

• income bracket/status
• age
• gender
• race
• location

of their potential audience, a method of categorising known as demographics. Once they know this they can begin to shape their text to appeal to a group with known reading/viewing/listening habits.

One common way of describing audiences is to use a letter code to show their income bracket:

A	Top management, bankers, lawyers, doctors and other highly salaried professionals
B	Middle management, teachers, many ‘creatives’ eg graphic designers etc
C1	Office supervisors, junior managers, nurses, specialist clerical staff etc
C2	Skilled workers, tradespersons (white collar)
D	Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers (blue collar)
E	Unemployed, students, pensioners, casual workers

They also consider very carefully how that audience might react to, or engage with, their text. The following are all factors in analysing or predicting this reaction.

AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT	This describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text.
AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS	These are the advance ideas an audience may have about a text. This particularly applies to genre pieces. Don’t forget that producers often play with or deliberately shatter audience expectations.
AUDIENCE FOREKNOWLEDGE	This is the definite information (rather than the vague expectations) which an audience brings to a media product.
AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION	This is the way in which audiences feel themselves connected to a particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle.
AUDIENCE PLACEMENT	This is the range of strategies media producers use to directly target a particular audience and make them feel that the media text is specially ‘for them’.
AUDIENCE RESEARCH	Measuring an audience is very important to all media institutions. Research is done at all stages of production of a media text, and, once produced, audience will be continually monitored.

Audience reaction to even early versions of a media text is closely watched. Hollywood studios routinely show a pre-release version of every movie they make to a test audience, and will often make changes to the movie that are requested by that audience. (Via  mediaknowall.com)