Deadline Day Homework- Audience

AUDIENCE: How the media forms target, reach and address audiences, how audiences interpret and respond to them and how members of audiences become producers themselves.

When considering an audience group, you must consider:
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Occupation
  • Education.
Media audiences can be targeted via occupation groups. The groups are broken up into:

Group A: Lawyers, doctors, well-paid professionals
Group B: Teachers, middle management, fairly well-paid professionals
Group C1: Junior management, nurses, 'white collar' workers
Group C2: Electricians, plumbers, 'blue collar' workers
Group D: Manual workers e.g drivers
Group E: Students, unemployed, pensioners


An audience can be defined by how they think and by considering their values, lifestyle and attitudes; this is a psychometric audience profile.
The profiles are:

The Aspirer

  • Wants status brands that show their place in society.
  • Invests in luxury goods
  • Stylish and on trend
  • Persuaded by celebrity endorsements.
The Explorer
  • Likes to discover new things.
  • Likes new or innovative brands.
  • Seek discovery.
The Mainstreamer
  • Make up 40% of the population
  • Like tried and trusted brands
  • Like value for money
  • Less likely to take risks
The Reformer
  • Not influenced by status
  • Not materialistic
  • Invest in products that are good for the environment
The Resigned
  • Normally older people who have built up attitudes over time.
  • Believe in traditions that have grown to trust.
  • Seek to survive.
The Struggler
  • 'Live for the day' attitude
  • Doesn't think about the future.
  • Seek escape.
  • See themselves as victims with only their physical skills to help.
The Succeeder
  • High social status
  • In control with nothing to prove.
  • Believe they deserve the best
  • Decide upon brands based on reliability.

The media can affect audiences through the 'hypodermic needle theory' which is the theory that the media controls what you see and what you take in, it gets 'shoved in your ears' and you don't have a choice about it. This supports the theory by Albert Bandura that the media can influence you directly. Bandura carried out an experiment in which he placed children in a room with adults and gave them toys. The child would watch the adult play aggressively with the toy then the adult would leave the room. As they watched, the children copied the adult by playing aggressively with the toy. Bandura believed that children would copy behaviour they saw, in particular violent behaviour which is content available in the media. 

The opposite to this theory is the 'Uses and Gratification' theory. The theory is that you have a choice in what media you view and what you take in. There are many parts to this theory which state different uses to the media:
  • Identity- use the media to discover who we are e.g reading women's magazines.
  • Relationships- Making bonds with people in the media and these can have an affect on our own relationships. E.g watching the program 'Friends'
  • Diversion- Using the media to pass the time and escape e.g scrolling through Facebook
  • Survilance- Seeking information e.g watching the news
The uses of media are increasing as an audience can become a prosumer (producer and consumer) which means that the audience can create new media based on media they have seen or interact with the creators of the media content in which they are viewing. This links with the increasing Media Industry and the theory by Clay Shirky.

If audiences like media products they can show their opinions strongly through the use of a fandom which is a theory by Henry Jenkins. A fan is someone who loves something and Jenkins believes that fans play a key role in the media with the important phrase "If it's not spread, it's dead". A fandom is a community built around a common interest. These fans may then become prosumers and create media associated with their common interest.

Audiences can take different things from the media as suggested by the Reception theory by Stuart Hall. He believes that media products are encoded with ideas to get a message across and the audience need to try and decode the message. The theory states that there are three types of readings associated with the decoding:
  • The Preferred Reading- The particular message by the media has been received by the audience and has been accepted by them.
  • The Negotiated Reading- The audience understands the message by the media and accepts some of the ideas but rejects others.
  • The Oppositional Reading- When the audience interprets the media product and doesn't accept the messages the producers want them to.


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