RESEARCH: AUDIENCE ANALYSIS

Audiences within Media

Introduction

Knowing that a media text is planned with a specific audience in mind. This will help me when it comes to making my own production and marketing it to my target audience. My next task is to make an audience profile for my own production. 

Audience: A Key Concept

All media texts are produced with an audience in mind. Therefore an audience is a part of the media equation. Television producers need an audience for their programmes, so they can finance those programmes and make more programmes that the audience likes. Advertisers need an audience who will see or hear their advertisements and then buy the products. A media text is planned with a particular audience in mind. A television producer then has to explain to a broadcaster what type of person is going to watch the programme/ what type of audience is going to be attracted to the programme.

Audience Profiling

A common and traditional method of audience research is known as demographics. This defines the adult population largely by the work that they do. It breaks the population down into 6 groups, and labels them by using a letter code to describe the income and status of the members of each group. The majority of distributors would target the E category due to the fact that students are a part of it and the majority of films would appeal to a students, similarly many films would be targeted at families due to the high level of potential revenue.

The Role of the Media in Moral Panics

The media play a huge role in the idea of moral panics. For example the shooting in the screening for The Dark Knight Rises. Once the media reported on it, it sparked immediate controversy on the internet. This is not a new problem, this kind of thing has happened many times previously for example, the game Manhunt in the murder of Stefan Pakeerah in 2004 by his friend Warren LeBlanc. This is a form of copycat crime, copycat crime is when a particular person uses events within a movie and recreates them in real life and inflicts them on someone or something for example a form of murder was recreated against Stefan and the actions within A Clockwork Orange in the number of rapes and violent attacks on people.

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Psychographics

Psychographics is a way of describing an audience by looking at the behaviour and personality tratis of its members. Psychographics label a particular type of person and makes a profile about that persons viewing and spending habits and patterns. Maslows heriarchy of needs is a perfect example of how we use film to gratiffy our needs but it is also a way in which flim distributors categorise us as an audience and this helps them adapt their marketing to make it more appealing for us as an audience. 

Maslows Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow's hierarchy of needs as way in which we can define and see how media satisfy our needs. Most people look to get to self-actualization when they consume media products. Hence the high demand and high sales that most films achieve as people are persevering to climb higher and higher up Maslow's pyramid and the high demand for people wanting to achieve that peak of the pyramid. Most films that we as an audience watch complete our psychological needs as they satisfy us, similarly most films achieve our esteem needs as they make us feel more confident about ourselves.

Adorno and the culture industry

Adorno (1903-69) argued that capitalism fed people with the products of a 'culture industry' - the opposite of 'true' art - to keep them passively satisfied and politically apathetic Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more 'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life. False needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries. These are needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness. Products of the culture industry may be emotional or apparently moving, but Adorno sees this as cathartic - we might seek some comfort in a sad film or song, have a bit of a cry, and then feel restored again

Two Step Flow Model

The two step flow model suggests that messages from the media moves in two directions- First the individual, opinion leader, receives the message then posts his own interpretation- The second absorbs this information. The information is first adopted by the individuals, the opinion leaders. The information is then passed on in their own interpretation. This theory reduces the power of the media as it states that social factors make a bigger impact on audiences than the media. 

Reception Theory

RECEPTION THEORY focuses on the scope in textual analysis for 'negotiation' and 'opposition' on the part of the audience. This means that a text ( a book, film, advert, poster or other creative work) is not passively accepted by the audience but that the reader / viewer interprets the meanings of the texts based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. Stuart Hall’s encoding decoding model; dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings; why Hall says he studies culture instead of media specifically, and media hegemony. Therefore the audience is not longer seen as passive recipients of media. 

The Hypodermic Needle Model

Dating from the 1920s, this theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media. It is a crude model (see picture!) and suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data. Don't forget that this theory was developed in an age when the mass media were still fairly new - radio and cinema were less than two decades old. Governments had just discovered the power of advertising to communicate a message, and produced propaganda to try and sway populaces to their way of thinking.

Media- Uses and Gratifications

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. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:  -surveillance  -correlation  -entertainment  -cultural transmission We, as an audience, use media to gratify our needs and that we are highly influenced by media but also by our peers. Media relies heavily on the idea that if one member of a social group watches a film or TV program and that that person will go and spread the movie or TV show through word of mouth. Word of mouth promotion is free and spreads like wildfire.Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (ie uses and gratifications):    Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.    Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life    Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts    Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains

BFI Exit Polls 

  "We carry out exit poll surveys for all the films we support through our Distribution Fund. Exit polls are standard practice for major releases, but much less so for smaller or independent films. "

The BFI are one of the many cinema's that do exit polls. They provide invaluable market research and they also provide personal information of the people that have watched the film. Like for example some of the questions they will ask will be: gender, favorite genre of film, socio-economic class, age, how they found out about the film.  The most important market research that distributors find out, as well as cinemas, is provided by the exit polls. For example one significant piece of information that was found from the exit polls was that 34% of people find out about films from the trailers. One exit poll that was hugely successful was the one from 71'. 

The Role of the BBFC

  The BBFC looks at issues such as discrimination, drugs, horror, dangerous and easily imitable behaviour, language, nudity, sex, and violence when making decisions. The theme of the work is also an important consideration. They also consider context, the tone and likely impact of a work on the potential audience. Audiences are therefore guided in their viewing; vulnerable audiences are protected. Similar regulation applies to the viewing of video games which are regulated by PEGI