AS1: Task 7: Audience information

Audience Information

Agencies:

Advertisement agencies create a variety of advertising strategies in order to create marketing campaigns that tailor to the audience's needs. Agencies pitch their ideas to future clients who would generally be interested in their product. Presentation is important when presenting your ideas because you would need to engage with the audience in order for them to consider becoming a client for an agency. 

Clients:

Clients are provided with a detailed prospective of viewers and the final advertising campaign. 

Audience:

An audience can range from an individual, to a group of people who watch or read media text. These can include, listening to the radio, reading magazines and watching television, thus why audiences are important.

Audiences play a huge role in the media, because without them, there wouldn't necessarily be any forms of media and agencies and production would lose out on money if there wasn't an audience to
watch what they were producing.

Having an advancement in technology can help to increase ratings in shows as people can access more ways to watch their favourite programmes.

Types of audiences:

Mass/Broadcast Audience: Audience members who are mainly focused on mainstream TV Soaps. This includes media that targets all ages. A few examples of TV Soaps would be Eastenders, Hollyoaks, Coronation Street and many more.

Niche Audience: This is a smaller group of audience members with a specific type of interest in their choice of media.

Age and gender:

Age is another main factor of media. For example older forms of media (radio, newspapers, etc) would generally gain more listeners/readers from the older generation. Newer forms of media would be watched/listened to/read by the younger generation. This could be due to the advancement in technology as media can be presented through applications on phones/laptops/tablets. Media can also be listened to through audio players online as well.

Gender is also affiliated the media. If an advertisement is shown during the break of a netball match for example, the advert could be targeted more towards women. If the advertisement was shown during a break of a football match, it would be targeted more towards men.

Psychographics:

Psychographics is the segmentation of marketing which divides groups of people by their social class and lifestyle. Psychographics is based on whether people can afford to be living wealthy, or not. For example, the wealthy may purchase products targeted towards their income, or have media depicting expensive products towards their social class.

It is useful to divide market research by psychographics because is provides the assumption that products are distinguished between individual purchases and it reflects on the customers characteristics. This will provide the company with an accurate result as to who purchases their product more often.

Geodemographics:

This is used within marketing media which classifies a specific group, gender or age. Geodemographics are broken up into separate categories depending on people's jobs, education or status in society.

For example, if a group of people haven't received much education in their lifetime, it will be quite difficult to educate them on the product a company is trying to advertise. If a company were to advertise a product aimed at those who are in the scientific field at school and/or work, those who aren't in that field may not understand the actual purpose of the product since it wouldn't necessarily apply to them.

Diving market research into geodemographics can demonstrate why companies would want to advertise their products into certain groups because it will portray the social classes of each individual.

BARB:

The Broadcasters Audience Research Board measures television audiences and has been doing so for over thirty years. Shown below are screen grabs demonstrating what BARB has achieved by doing this.

Audience Measurement Panels:

Audience measurement is important for gathering information in the media as it is produced through media text. However measuring an audience comes with its pros and cons and these include:

Pros:

• Gathering different data sets of information from different families across the country - this helps for accurate results if there is a larger number to work with.

Cons:

• Different families may want to watch other programmes that aren't the same as what another family may want to watch (for example).