Audiences are important to the media industry as they provide income through purchases of media products and advertising, and their consumption habits are used to measure the success of media products. As technology has advanced, audiences have become more fragmented as individuals consume media across multiple platforms tailored to their specific interests. Producers target niche audiences through demographic profiling of characteristics like social class, lifestyle, age, and location to effectively market their media products.

1. Media Audiences
Converging Digital Technology
Thursday 13th December 2012

2. What are media audiences?
• Listening to radio
• Watching television
• Reading a newspaper
• Listening to music
• Seeing advertising hoardings
• Watching a film in the cinema
• Reading magazines
• Internet communication

3. Why are audiences important?
• Without an audience, why would anyone create a media
text? What is the point of a film that no one sees?
• Audience size and reaction are seen as a way of measuring
the ‘success’ of a media product.
• Audiences who buy media products are providing income
for the media companies who produce them.
• Much of the media is free or financed by advertising.
Advertisers want to know how many people are seeing
their adverts.
• Many people want to know how we use the media, what
we understand of what we consume, and the effects that
media has on our lives.

4. How have audiences changed?
The media and its audiences are constantly
changing as a result of media technology,
changes in the way we live our lives and
because we as individuals change.

5. Question 1
• How has your media consumption changed
over the past ten years?
• Can you identify those changes that are the
result of your own individual changes in age,
circumstances, interests etc. and those
changes that are the result of changes in
technology affecting what is on offer to you?

6. Classification of Audiences
Producers have to target their products at
groups of people who have something in
common

7. Market Niche
• Market – Group of customers a media
product can target
• Niche – Specialised and narrowly defined
segments of the market

8. Demographic Groups
• Social Class
• Lifestyle
• Where they Live
• Age
• Ethnicity
• Gender
• Sexual Orientation

9. Question 2

10. Social Class
• Occupation and Level of Income
• Choice of these factors obviously results in
different groupings, but a very important one -
“social class” - refers to factors relating to power
and wealth
• Power, wealth and prestige are closely related,
but there is not complete congruence
• In early society the most powerful group, the
nobility, based its power on the possession of
land

11. Social Class
• As society developed, while land remained
important, wealth could be gained by
manufacture and trade
• An important feature of wealth gained in this
way is that it is very flexible and can be used
to invest and generate more wealth
• Wealth could also be achieved by acquiring
rare and complex skills

12. Social Class
• Because there is an instinct to associate merit
with height groups of people with power
became “upper” class which led to an analogy
with geological strata (layers)
• Various criteria can be conveniently used to
place people in these groups or classes, the
most familiar being informal based on
lifestyle. For formal purposes, occupation is
most commonly used

13. Socio-Economic Classification (SEC) for the
2001 census
1. Professionals, inc. teachers and social workers, plus business
executives and entrepreneurs
2. Junior managers in smaller organisations, inc. policemen, hospital
nurses,journalists and market researchers
3. Skilled manual and clerical workers, inc. telephone engineers,
secretaries and dental nurses
4. Small employers, with fewer than 25 employees, plus the self-
employed
5. Supervisors of those in routine and semi-routine occupations
6. Semi-routine occupations, including sales assistants,factory workers
and drivers
7. Routine occupations, inc. domestic workers and labourers
8. Never worked or long-term unemployed

14. Question 3a & 3b
Analyse your household’s current social
economic status
• Which category would they fall into?
• Which media products do they consume?
• Match the media products with SEC groups

15. Problems with SEC
• The problem with using occupation as a means of
classification is that people without paid
occupations cannot be directly classified
• Apart from criteria which were used to allocate
people to classes, there are many other
associated variables e.g. education, diet,
smoking and drinking habits
• The differences in lifestyle and behaviour are in
part determined by physical circumstances but
must also reflect attitudes

16. Social Class Movement
• Position in the social hierarchy is not fixed.
Individuals move up and down for a mixture
of reasons.
• Status could change by:
– Marriage
– Generational change
– Occupational change

17. Psychographics
• The measure of people’s likes and dislikes
• IAO variables – Interests, Activities and Opinions
• Electrified by the omnipresence of the internet,
social media, online sharing and boundary-less
conversation
• People with similar interests, shared beliefs and
in-common hobbies like each other. People
recommend products they like and trust. ££££££

18. Question 4

19. Audiences and Converging Technology
“More and more people immerse themselves in
all kinds of networked, portable and
personalized media”
“Hyperfragmentation of audiences across
multiple media”

20. Audiences and Converging Technology
“People increasingly multitask and divide their
time across different media and media use
becomes highly individualized”
“Market researchers conclude that consumers
tend to look for items that are more particular
to their wants and needs”

21. Question 5
• What are the current demands from
audiences?
• Consider expectations, cost and availability

22. Assignment: Audience Report
Describe the changing expectations of
audiences and consumers within a chosen
creative media industry.
Explain and give examples such as increased
demand, expectation of information, lower
cost and availability
Use what we have discussed today as a basis
and expand upon it with your own knowledge
and experiences

23. References
• SOCIETY & SOCIAL CLASSIFICATION
13/04/2000 T.Davies, D.Leeder
http://www.ucel.ac.uk/medsoc/ssc/ssc.pdf
• BTEC First Diploma Media Production
P Bayliss, P Holmes & G Starkey
2007 Heinemann Educational Publishers
• Media Work
M Deuze
2007 Polity Press