Media Audiences

Media Audiences

Audiences are constructed by producers. Segmentation and grouping allow specific audiences to be targeted.

Demographic

A demographic audience profile defines groups based on age, gender, income, education and occupation.

Segmentation

Audience segmentation is a process of dividing people into homogeneous subgroups (demo/psychographic)

Psychographics

A psychographic audience profile defines groups based on interests, personality traits and motivations

Target Audience

A target audience is the intended audience of a product

Marketing

Marketing refers to activities undertaken by a company to promote the buying or selling of a product

Niche Audience

A relatively small audience with specialised interests, tastes, and backgrounds.

mass audience

a large, broad audience interested in a variety of general topics

global audience

an international audience, worldwide

BARB

UK not-for-profit company.
British Audience Research Board.

RAJAR

Company jointly owned by the BBC and the Radiocentre. Radio Joint Audience Research.

YouGov

a British international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm

Media Pack

A media pack tells advertisers who their audience
is and who will read their text.
Audiences are sold to advertisers

Audience Effects

Theories which suggest the media is able to directly influence audience opinion and behaviour.

Moral Panic

an instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening the moral standards of society.

Mean World Syndrome

The perception of many heavy television watchers of violent programs that the world is a more dangerous and violent place than facts and statistics bear out.

Audience Needs

Theories which suggest audiences choose which texts to consume in order to fulfil their needs.

Active audience

the idea that people are not simply passive recipients of media messages; they respond to content based on their personal backgrounds, interests, and interpersonal relationships

Passive Audience

The assumption that audiences passively accept the messages that media give them

Cultivation Theory (Gerbner)

The media can create, 'grow' or cultivate an idea that influences the audience's perception of reality

Bandura's Bobo Doll Experiment

In this experiment children watched a model attack a doll and then the children were put in a room with toys including the same doll and children it was found that the kids who watched the model were much more likely to imitate the actions.

Blumler and Katz uses and gratifications theory

an active audience theory that suggests there are basic needs which people use the media to satisfy.

Stuart Hall - Reception Theory

3 types of audience viewers: dominant, negotiated and oppositional

Stuart Hall: Encoding and Decoding

model of studying media production and reception that argues the production and consumption of media texts are social processes in which ideological meaning is constructed

Generation X (Gen X)

generational cohort of people born between 1965 and 1976

Generation Y (Millennials)

the group of consumers born between 1979 and 1994

Generation Z (Gen Z)

Generational cohort of people born between 2001 and 2014. Also known as Digital Natives because people in this group were born into a world that already was full of electronic gadgets and digital technologies, such as the Internet and social networks.

digital natives

young people who have grown up using the internet and social networking

digital immigrant

an individual who grew up in the analog media era and who generally has more trouble adapting to new digital technologies, despite perhaps a desire to use and understand them

Uses and Gratifications Theory

An approach to studying mass communication that looks at the reasons why audience members choose to spend time with the media in terms of the wants and needs of the audience members that are being fulfilled.