The document discusses audience research and target audiences for media texts. It explains that producers consider whether a media text has an intended audience and conduct research like questionnaires and focus groups to understand their target audience. It also discusses categorizing audiences by demographics like age, gender, income level to shape texts to appeal to particular groups. The document outlines different ways audiences may engage with, have expectations of, and identify with media texts.

1. Task 3 Audience Research and Target Audiences

2. Constructing 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. Audience research is a major part of any media company, using questionnaires, focus groups, and comparisons to existing media texts. So far I have made comparisons to existing media products. Our group is now going to concentrate on producing a questionnaire on a focus group. In the development of our star image we reshurch the consumption characteristics of teenage music audiences in various different genres, this helps with targeting our susific audience. Now using a curtain audience group we are going to examine how successful it was in helping construct our maid products.

3. The industry uses 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:

4. DEMOGRAPHIC CHART A Top management, bankers, lawyers, doctors and other 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 Depending on the genre of the music and artists or a band could appeal to a wide spectrum of people with in the demographic chart. Audience are also looked at in different category such as: income bracket/status age gender race location It is important consider very carefully how that audience might react to, or engage with, their text.

5. AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT This describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text (Stuart Hall) 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.

6. CREATING AUDIENCE Once a media text has been made, its producers need to ensure that it reaches the audience it is intended for. All media texts will have some sort of marketing campaign attached to them. Elements of this might include posters print advertisements trailers promotional interviews (eg stars appearing on chat shows) tie-in campaigns (eg a blockbuster movie using McDonalds meals) merchandising (t-shirts, baseball caps, key rings) Marketing campaigns are intended to create awareness of a media text. Once that awareness has been created, hopefully audiences will come flocking in their hundreds of millions.

7. EFFECTS MODELS For A2 level you need a working knowledge of the theories which attempt to explain how an audience receives, reads and responds to a text. Over the course of the past century or so, media analysts have developed several effects models , ie theoretical explanations of how humans ingest the information transmitted by media texts and how this might influence (or not) their behaviour. Effects theory is still a very hotly debated area of Media and Psychology research, as no one is able to come up with indisputable evidence that audiences will always react to media texts one way or another. The scientific debate is clouded by the politics of the situation: some audience theories are seen as a call for more censorship, others for less control. Whatever your personal stance on the subject, you must understand the following theories and how they may be used to deconstruct the relationship between audience and text.

8. CREATING AUDIENCE Once a media text has been made, its producers need to ensure that it reaches the audience it is intended for. All media texts will have some sort of marketing campaign attached to them. Elements of this might include posters print advertisements trailers promotional interviews in these magazines as well as stars appearing on chat shows. Such as Radio one and XFM. Pod cast on itunes, my space and their official website, late night with Julies Holland, 4 music, never mind the buzzcocks, NME music channel, spotify, iTunes single of the week. Festivals, Seatwave, local festivals like Guilfest. tie-in campaigns- such as adverts, a good example of this is the original song by Chairlift was used for a iTunes advert. We suggest something similar for the Faulks. Merchandising: t-shirts,posters, key rings, wristband, hoddie, plectrums. Marketing campaigns are intended to create awareness of a media text. Once that awareness has been created, hopefully audiences will come flocking in their hundreds of millions.

9. COUNTING AUDIENCE New Midea-count the number of hits on media sources such as: Print Magazines and newspapers measure their circulation (ie numbers of copies sold). They are open about these figures - they have to be as these are the numbers quoted to advertisers when negotiating the price of a page. Radio/TV Measuring the number of viewers and listeners for a TV/Radio programme or whole station's output is a complex business. Generally, an audience research agency (eg BARB) will select a sample of the population and monitor their viewing and listening habits over the space of 7 days. The data gained is then extrapolated to cover the whole population, based on the percentage sample. The numbers obtained are known as the viewing figures or ratings . A good example of this is: The number of viewings on Youtube. The number of peruses on iTunes. The number of viewers on Spotify.

10. EFFECTS MODELS Over the course of the past century or so, media analysts have developed several effects models , ie theoretical explanations of how humans ingest the information transmitted by media texts and how this might influence (or not) their behaviour. Effects theory is still a very hotly debated area of Media and Psychology research, as no one is able to come up with indisputable evidence that audiences will always react to media texts one way or another. The scientific debate is clouded by the politics of the situation: some audience theories are seen as a call for more censorship, others for less control.

11. The Hypodermic Needle Basically, the Hypodermic Needle Model suggests that the information from a text passes into the mass consciousness of the audience unmediated , ie the experience, intelligence and opinion of an individual are not relevant to the reception of the text. This theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers. It assumes that the audience are passive . This theory is still quoted during moral panics by parents, politicians and pressure groups, and is used to explain why certain groups in society should not be exposed to certain media texts (shoot’em up films in the 1980s, rap music in the 2000s), for fear that they will watch or read sexual or violent behaviour and will then act them out themselves. This theory is the same theory that supports the ideas of technological determinism. The Hypodermic model quickly proved too clumsy for media researchers seeking to more precisely explain the relationship between audience and text.

12. The Two-Step Flow This theory suggests that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts.

13. Uses and Gratifications Katz and Blumler During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown ups, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. It was suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society: surveillance correlation entertainment