Introduction to Audience

Audience Identification and Groupings 

Media is preoccupied with audience because essentially that is who media is made for, and if it isn't a good standard it can affect the producer as well. Not only this, but it is a way of making money.

TARGET AUDIENCE - it is the audience which the producer aims their media product towards. For example, producers could aim towards a certain age range or a certain gender.

PRIMARY AUDIENCE - this is the specific type of audience a producer is making their product for.

SECONDARY AUDIENCE - This is the rest of the audience that the product is aimed at, which may not be who the product was intended for but still appeals to.

T.A.P - TEXT -> AUDIENCE <--> PRODUCER

(Producer encodes the text, the audience decodes this. However, the producer must think about the way the audience will receive it and the audience can feed back to the producer what they thought)

Targeting: Who the producer wants to get/is aiming to get
Attracting: Giving the product aspects of appeal, how it draws the audience in
Reaching: Attempting to obtain a wider audience
Addressing: The way the product talks to the audience
Constructing: The audience, who will be constructed to like the product

The Last of Us - PlayStation3 2013

Primary Audience: mise-en-scene is dark and gloomy, with ripped clothes on the characters and
therefore it is seemingly aimed at a young male audience. The guns and the canted angle suggest an FPS game with a sense of mystery/survival, and the mise-en-scene of the buildings suggests a post-apocalyptic game. It could make men feel more protective, as there is a young girl in the image.

Secondary Audience: Younger male audience, due to the young girl and how full on the game appears to be. The proairetic code is created by the tilt of the camera angle, and the way they are walking. Hermeneutic codes are created by the relation between the characters, the setting, and the way they are looking - who/what are they looking at. This could also be aimed at a female audience due to the strong representation of the young girl.


Ways to break down audience -

• Gender
• Age
• Class
• Interests/Hobbies
• Stereotypes
• Nationality/Culture
• Religion/Beliefs
• Ideology
• Location

Demographics - a way of identifying people

This system isn't very well defined. It is also unfair to class some people and it is hard to change which class you belong to, and is quite reductive. Some people may be in a certain class, however they will try to act as though they are something better than that, and they will want to buy products that are apparently aimed at the higher classes. It doesn't tell us much about the audience itself.

Psychographics - The classification of a people according to attitudes, aspirations and other psychological criteria

• Aspirers are people who want to appear rich and attractive
• Reformers are people who want social change, are unimpressed by status and make decisions based on their values, like environmentalists.
• Explorers are adventurers, and like taking risks
• Mainstreamers are people who tend to follow the crowd
• Strugglers are people who find it hard to achieve 

McDonald's Pickles Advert

• The apartment and mise-en-scene suggests that it is for the lower middle class, as they aren't in a modern and fancy house.
• He walks around the town, rather than driving to the supermarket, which suggests possible someone who has the psychographics of a struggler.