What do you call the group of consumers for whom media text was constructed as well as anyone else who is exposed to the text?

DURATION: 8 hours

BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE

We all have experience as media audiences. Children and adults both spend a significant amount of their time each day engaged in media and communications activities. A common assumption has been that an audience is a homogeneous group of passive individuals who will interpret a text in the same way. More accurately, there are two main ways of studying media audiences. The first is as consumers of media products, or what the media and communications industry describes as ‘target audiences’. The second is based on reception theory, where audiences are seen as active participants in reading and interpreting media and information texts.

Target audiences are groups of readers, viewers or listeners defined by specific characteristics such as age, income, gender or interests. This is a specific group for whom media and other organizations develop content and shape messages. For example, advertisers are very concerned about buying time or space that will provide them with access to a specific demographic or target audience. In the television industry, for example, advertisers will buy commercial time slots from a network during a particular programme, if that programme is attracting the audience they want to reach.

While we can be seen as a target audience for the media, every time we see or hear a media text our response is based on our individual social knowledge and the experiences we bring to a text. When we receive messages or information from the media, we interpret it through our personal ideology and values.

It is also very possible, however, that we actually negotiate the meaning we take from a text, accepting some elements and rejecting others. How meaning is constructed in footage or photographs (through camera angles, types of shots, editing, etc.) also affects audience interpretations in different ways.

Researchers have discovered that magazine readers spend little more than 2  seconds glancing over a page. On television, a typical commercial ‘spot’ is only 15 or 30 seconds long, and many viewers ‘flip’ through commercial breaks, or ‘surf’ the Internet, staying in one ‘place’ for only seconds at a time. In order to connect quickly with today’s consumers, producers of media texts often create strong emotional appeal based on research into social demographics or ‘psychographics’, which is the analysis of people’s attitudes, beliefs, desires and needs. Although a creative team cannot predict how each individual will react to the media, their research will give them a good idea of how large groups of the population will react.

Why do we study media audiences? Audience study helps to explain how important issues are seen by different people, according to their gender, age, or social group. It also helps us understand the relationship between the producer and audience of a text, and how producers attempt to influence audiences to read their material in a particular way. It helps us understand how young people make meaning of media texts in their lives outside the classroom. In this information age, audience study can also help us determine how to create our own media texts and communicate with our audiences more effectively.

This module will explore several key questions: How does a producer/author’s background influence an individual’s understanding of a media text? How does the construction of a text guide the interpretive process? How does an individual negotiate meaning in a media text? How do audiences use the media in their daily lives?

• Audience and market research
• Identifying target audiences
• How audiences negotiate meaning

After completing this unit, teachers will be able to:

• Explore the notion of audience – both target and active
• Identify reasons for interpretations of media texts
• Analyze how audiences are identified and targeted
• Explain how audiences choose which media they consume and interact with
• Analyze how audiences respond to media texts and explain the determining factors
• Examine the relationship between production, message and audience

PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES and ACTIVITIES

Collect and describe examples of how people use mass media in their daily lives. Consider the use of media for information, entertainment, monitoring, companionship, and identification. Find some material from Internet sites on popular television programmes or music. What do these sources tell you about how audiences use and enjoy the media? How might these uses be different from what the producers intended?

• Imagine how a family from a completely different background or time period might interpret some current television programmes or advertisements. What would they say about media audiences today?
• Using the Internet, research the response of audiences in a variety of countries to popular television programmes. How are these programmes and their main characters and plots ‘read’ or interpreted by various audiences?
• Analyze the messages and values conveyed through a popular media text such as a television programme. How might the messages change if people of a different social group (e.g. age, ethnic background) were included, or if the male and female characters switched roles? How might this impact the audience?
• Using the Internet, research the current strategies advertisers are using to understand and target audiences, such as psychographics or social demographics. Describe the approach, identify the categories, and reflect on the assumptions made about audiences today
• Survey newspapers and magazines to collect a number of ads you think will appeal to people in each of these categories; OR:

  Choose a product and create an outline for an ad that would appeal to each of the researched audience categories. Consider the key words and images you would use for each

• Give two opposite readings of a popular media text, such as a film, television programme or newspaper article. Determine the audience characteristics or background that might contribute to each critical reading. How does this explain the variety of responses that a popular media text might receive from audiences?
• Scan a number of newspapers or use the Internet to access current film titles. Based on the titles and the advertising for these films, what do you expect to see in each film? Who do you think the target audience is for each of these films?
• In many cinemas today, audiences watch advertisements before the feature film begins. Based on the films in the previous exercise, what kind of ads would you expect to be shown to the audiences before these films?
• Using still or video pictures, create a collage of images you would use to sell your school to a particular audience. Consider the use of appropriate icons, symbols, visual and verbal language, music, colours, camera shots and angles, etc. to engage and speak to this audience. Audiences for this collage could be potential students who might enrol in the school, parents of these students, school trustees, a politician, etc.
• Examine the promotional material that is available for colleges and universities in your region. If students are shown, what do they look like? What are they doing? What image of the school is being shown in this material? What impression do they give of the school they represent? Are they real students or models? If students do not appear, what images were chosen and what do they say about the institution? Based on your analysis of the material, who is the target audience? What message is being conveyed?
• Many independent brands, films, television programmes, and alternative magazines exist outside of the large media corporations. Examine some of these media products to find out what value – social, artistic or commercial – they have to offer their audiences. How do the producers or creators pay for and market their products?
• Investigate the research of Blumer and Katz (1974), who stated that audiences might choose and use a media text for one or all of the following reasons:
  • Diversion: an escape from everyday life
  • Personal relationships: seeing yourself connected to a television character or ‘family’
  • Personal identity: being able to identify with and learn from the behaviour, attitudes and values reflected in media texts
  • Surveillance: using the media and information texts to learn about what is going on in the world around you, and to gain Information that could be useful for daily life (e.g., weather forecasts, news, election results, etc.)
• Identify specific examples in your life or the lives of your students that illustrate these reasons for using media and information texts

ASSESSMENT RECOMMENDATIONS

• Development of ad campaign outline
• Preferred and oppositional readings of MIL texts
• Collage of school images
• Textual analysis
• Internet research

RESOURCES FOR THIS MODULE

These sources are drawn from North America and are here for illustrative purposes only. More relevant resources should be found by the trainers themselves, drawn from their own region or country.

• Advertising Age – An industry publication, with advertising costs, reports on strategies, target audience research, etc.
• The Persuaders – Frontline – This programme explores how the strategies of marketing and advertising have come to influence not only what people buy, but also how they view themselves and the world around them. This 90-minute documentary draws on a range of experts and observers of the advertising/marketing world. The entire show can be viewed online at the PBS website in six excerpts.
• The Merchants of Cool – Frontline – This programme explores the world of market research involving young people, the work of ‘cool’ hunters, and the selling of ‘cool’.
• The Internet Movie Data Base – The most comprehensive site for researching films and television from the industrialized countries. There is a wealth of information on individual titles – reviews, actors, directors, genres, marketing and audience research, etc.