A2 Media by Jade Melady

Audience

‘Audience’ defined:1. The spectators or listeners assembled at a performance, for example, or attracted by a radio or television program.2. The readership for printed matter, as for a book or magazine.3. A body of adherents; a following.

Over the years audience’s have been categorized, theorized and disputed.

Julian McDougall(2009) suggests that in the online age it is getting harder to conceive a media audience as a stable, identifiable group.

What is audience?

What is a target audience?• In marketing and advertising,

a target audience is a specific group of people within the target market at which a product or the marketing message of a product is aimed at.

Target Audience

• Why is a target audience necessary?A target audience is essential for industries because it helps them decide on how to market and advertise their film. An industries target audience can depend on many things, such as genre, age of cast, storyline, ect. For example, if an industries target audience was teenagers, the best way of promoting that film would be through television adverts and social networking. All of which teenagers regularly use, so it would be a fast and effective way of targeting them. It also allows them to not target the wrong audience, for example, an 18 certificated horror film, could not be advertised on Disney Channel, because t would reach the wrong audience.

• We have chosen our target audience to be teenagers/young adults (aged 15-24). We have chosen this age group as our target audience because of the storyline of our film(cyber bullying of a teenager) and the age of our actors.

• Both Male and Female, English and Working Class.We will make our film a 15 rated certificate.

Who is our target audience?

Audience Mood Board

• Social networking sites. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. We would use pages, adverts and pictures to promote the film using these sites. -This is an essential promotional base to use because 98% of 16-24 year olds use social networking. -22% of teenagers log in and out of Facebook over 10 times a day. -The total amount of page views YouTube receives each month is 92 billion.

• Film posters and billboards- The amount of people in the UK that drive cars is 75%. This means placing billboards in popular places in the country will help reach a larger target market. - There are thousands of universities in the UK, placing film posters around campuses will help boost promotion and advertise our film to our specific targeted age group.

• Film festivals- BFI London Film Festival and other film festivals across the country. Showing a preview release of our film at a film festival will increase the popularity and hype of our film and promote it further.

• TV Advertisements. Nearly every household across the country owns a television, meaning, the television adverts are a good way to promote our film, with teenagers and young adults watching at least an hour of television per day.

How will we target them?

Audience Theory

This theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media. It suggests that audiences passively receive the information transmitted via a media text, without any attempt on their part to process or challenge the data.

Hypodermic Needle Theory

However, this theory was developed in an age when the radio and cinema were only two decades old - so the mass media was quite new.It was especially seen in Europe during the First World War when the government produced the propaganda which they used to try and sway the masses into their way of thinking.

Two-Step Flow TheoryThe Two-step Theory assumes that the information does not flow directly from the media texts into the minds of its audience unprocessed, but is filtered through 'opinion leaders' who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. For example, think of film critics and how influential they can be about what you decide to go and see in the cinema.

View this link for more information about this theory:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csGHExeP3uA&feature=player_embedded

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

Researchers Blumer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (uses and gratifications):

- Diversion/Escapism - escape from everyday problems and routine.- Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, for example;

substituting soap operas for family life.- Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour, morals and values from

texts.- Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living such as; weather reports, financial

news, adverts ect.

Uses and Gratifications Theory

Julian McDougall(2009)……suggests that in the online age it is getting harder to conceive a media audience as a stable, identifiable group.

McQuail (1972)……an audience can be described as a “temporary collective”.