audience

1. Media Audiences
Understanding Audience?
Media audience is how we understand the relationship between the media
product and the audience and how the relationship is changing. Unlike the past,
this is no longer assumed to be only one way of interpreting a product and only
one audience response. Audiences are not just categorised as mass audiences as
their responses are complex and sophisticated, on top of this their responses are
influenced by more than one factor.
Audiences are made up of individuals whose social and cultural experiences may
effect how they respond to a variety of media texts. Industries that produce
media products are well aware of their audience and the strategies they need to
take to attract their audience.
There’s a range of different theories that help to
explain the different ways in which audiences
respond to media texts and the reasons for this.
For example Clay Shirky proposed a theory,
which is an idea that the Internet and digital
technologies have a profound effect on the
relations between media and individuals,
therefore we, as consumers, are more likely to
use the Internet and other technologies to
respond to texts. With this idea in mind, we
have reached out to our target audience
through three main social media platforms,
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which are all
commonly used by teenagers and young adults.
Types of Audience:
There are four types of audiences, target/
primary audiences, secondary audiences,
mass audiences, and niche audiences.
A primary audience is a group of
individuals, which a product is directly
aimed at. I order to reach this audience,
the owner of the product or the industry
responsible for the product would have to consider the needs, characteristics,
preferences, and consumption habits of the primary audience.
A secondary audience is the second most important group of consumers an
industry targets. The secondary audience is just below the primary audience, but
what makes the secondary audience owner than the primary audience is the fact

2. that this audience has fewer demands and might have less money to spend on
your product.
A mass audience, sometimes known as a broadcast audience, consists of people
who frequently consume popular/ mainstream products or texts. A niche
audience is smaller audience, which consists of a selected group of people with a
unique.
Out of all of these types of audiences, our product is aimed towards a mass
audience as the genre, which is drama, appeals to a large amount of people. Not
only this but our short film also deals with a topic, which is relevant and
mainstream, which will appeal to a larger audience.
Audience categories:
Demographic profiling –
this is a statistical way of
gathering information on
populations. We were
able to use this type of
data to gather
information about
different age groups and
how to target them.
Having age categories helps companies and institutions to target the right age
group to market their product to. In our production we choose people within the
age category of 12-30, therefore we were able to find specific ways to target our
chosen audience.
Another form of demographics
is class and occupation; this is a
way for us to target our
audience according to their
professional status and income.
The social status demographics
is divided into social grades
which are A (upper middle
class), B (middle class), C1
(lower middle class), C2
(skilled working class), D
(working Class), and E (those at
the lowest level of income).
Based on this information, we chose to base our target audience on people who
belonged to the D, C1, and C2 social grade because we wanted to target people
who would have more time on their hands to watch our film, and also because
our actresses mostly belong to these categories so our audience can familiarise
themselves with our actresses easily.

3. Another type of demographic is gender. Even
though our production only features females, we
still decided to target both male and females. The
main reason for this decision was due to the fact
that in the UK (2014) there were 450 male cases
for cancer compared to 310 cases for females,
which shows that cancer affects males as much as
females. Therefore having this as the main subject
of our plot makes it appealing to males too.
Audience response:
Different types of audience will respond to our product in different ways
depending on category they fall under. One type of audience is an active/
interactive audience, these people find themselves being actively involved in
making sense of the message provided by a given product, and applying it to
their social and personal lives.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory he proposed stating that human have
five needs, which include: self-actualisation (self-fulfilment needs), esteem needs
and belongingness and love needs (which are both categorised as psychological
needs), safety needs and physiological needs (which are both basic needs). This
theory suggests that an active audience fall into the category of self-actualisation
as these people often find themselves being involved with a product.

4. Another type of audience
response is from a passive
audience which is the
opposite of an active audience.
This audience consists of
people who do not engage
much with a media product
and simply just accepts
whatever the deeper message
of the media product is.
Katz and Lazafeld (1995)
proposed a hypodermic
needle theory which states
that the message conveyed in a product represents a bullet, which is fired from
the media (representing a gun) before it goes into a viewer’s head. This theory
suggests that messages are ‘injected’ into a passive audience before the message
is wholly received and accepted.