Audience Theory

AUDIENCE THEORY

1. What, or Who, is an audience?

An audience is a gathering of listeners; the people addressed by a piece of media such as a newspaper, magazine, television, DVD, radio or the internet. Any device such as a mobile phone, ipod are also able to carry and distribute the media texts. A media text is planned with a specific audience in mind, our music video is targeting youths andyoung adults, we are likely to have video published on YouTube and high status channels such as MTV.

2. Audience Research 1 - Demographics

This is a statistical data relating the population and popular groups within it, they define these groups by their income and status. It is clear to see by looking at the chart below that our music video will be targeting Group B – “Creative and media people” andGroup E “Unemployed, students, pensions, casual workers”. This is due to us appealing to people who tend to watch music videos of unique style e.g. media people and also those youths who tend to be unemployed or students.

These demographics are based on the National Readership Survey’s social-economic grades – www.nrs.co.uk

3. Audience Research 2 - Psychographics

This is the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations and other psychological criteria, allowing an assessment to be made on their viewing and spending habits.

The advertising agency Young and Rubican invented a successful psychographic profile known as their 4C’s Marketing Model – www.4cs.yr.com

4C = Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation

4. Hierarchy of Needs

American psychologist, Maslow suggested we all have different layers of needs and that we have to achieve a certain amount until we move onto the next layer. The necessities are be able to eat and sleep in safety before we move onto more complexneeds e.g. getting married.

The top of his pyramid states ‘Self actualisation’, which is the realisation or fulfilment of one’s talents and potentialities. 

Maslow's theory can be seen to be related to media, particularly advertisers andinstitution that carry advertising. These advertisers and institutions must know how to grab the audience's attention by certain media texts by increasing their self esteemand earning the respect from others if they consume these products. 

5. Audience Research 3

Specialist companies often investigate audiences in order to retrieve necessary information about them to report back to media producers. Audiences, however, have been proven to be far too sophisticated and are undifferentiated to a media stimulus - they are in fact, passive. Audience is an unquestioning, powerless mass that have no choice but to be influenced. The pre-conceptions of the audience can act as a powerful filter of media messages. However, this theory has been judged for being too simplistic and does not take into consideration people's individuality. 

6. Audience Theory 2 - Cultivation Theory

This theory also treats the audience as passive, suggesting that repeated exposureto the same message (advertisement) can put an imprint into the audience's attitudes and values. De-sensitisation = makes someone feel less shocked or distressedat scenes of cruelty, violence or suffering by over exposure to such images. However, this theory has also been judged as there is no real evidence that this leads audiences to being less shocked by real violence/killings. 

7. Audience Theory 3 - Two Step Flow Theory

Katz and Lazarsfeld assume a more active audience, suggesting that the messages from the media move in two different ways. Individuals who are opinion leadersreceive messages from the media and pass on their on interpretation in addition to the actual content. It is filtered through the opinion leaders who then pass it on to a morepassive audience. The audience mediate the information recieved directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by opinion leaders and that is how it turns out to be a 'two step flow', not a direct process. This can be compared to Twitterwhere we are able to 'Follow' people and see the latest 'Trends', all these influences have an effect on our attitudes towards media text. 

8. Audience Theory 4 - Active Audiences

This is the active audience is newer and more realistic than the older model- it sees the audience as individuals who interact with the communication process and use media texts for their own gratification and purposes. 

"We behave differently because we are different people from different background with many different attitudes, values, experiences and ideas"

9. Audience Theory 5 - Uses and Gratifications Model

This model suggests that media audiences are active and make active decisions about what they consume in relation to what they appeal to (socially, culturally). This also shows that certain groups are isolated, whereas others are grabbed depends on what they like (e.g. music genre). Blumier and Katz summed this up:

"Media usage can be explained in that it provides gratifications (meaning it satisfies needs) related to the satisfaction of social and psychological needs"

Audiences choose to watch programmes that make them feel good, our music video will have elements of escapism and feminism within it and our target audience will watch it to gain a sense of gratification as well as information. 

Blumier and Katz (1975)

 - Surveillance: our need to know what is going on (in relation to Maslow's security theory). Also able to keep up to date with dangers and news in order to satisfy our curiosity and feel safer. In link with our music video, it will be a very modern take on the song we are doing, our audience may appeal to it simply for curiosity of what costumes we will be wearing. 

- Personal Relationship/Social Interaction: our need to interact with others. Our audience for our music video may form a virtual relationship with the character in our video as she/he may sympathise with them. 

- Personal Identity: our need to define our identity and sense of self. Our music video is completely in link with this criteria, as it is based on youths discovering their true selfs and the conflict between teenager and adult.

- Diversion: the need for escape, entertainment and relaxation. Our music video will hopefully bring a sense of satisfaction to our viewers and they will enjoy watching it recreationally.

Audience Theory

AUDIENCE THEORY IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE...

• gives you a target audience
• can fulfil audiences expectations - codes and conventions
• produce something they want
• relate to them

Stuart Hall - Audience Positioning

- developed the concept of audience positioning as a result of examining new reports on industrial strikes
- audience watching a media text would be likely to fall into three categories:

1) dominant (or preferred) readings - audience adopts point of view implied
2) oppositional readings - audience challenges points of view implied
3) negotiated readings - audience sees both points of views

Aberrant readings - preferred reading is not recognised by audience at all.

Levi-Strauss - Binary Oppositions

In the mid-20th century, two major European academic thinkers, Claude Levi Strauss and Roland Barthes, had the important insight that the way we understand certain words depends not so much on any meaning they themselves directly contain, but much more by our understanding of the difference between the word and its 'opposite' or, as they called it 'binary opposite'. They realised that words merely act as symbols for society's ideas and that the meaning of words, therefore, was a relationship rather than a fixed thing: a relationship between opposing ideas.


For example, our understanding of the word 'coward' surely depends on the difference between that word and its opposing idea, that of a 'hero' (and to complicate matters further, a moment's thought should alert you to the fact that interpreting words such as 'hero' and 'coward' is itself much more to do with what our society or culture attributes to such words than any meaning the words themselves might actually contain).


Other oppositions that should help you understand the idea are the youth/age binary, the masculinity/femininity, the good/evil binary, and so on. Barthes and Levi-Strauss noticed another important feature of these 'binary opposites': that one side of the binary pair is always seen by a particular society or culture as more valued over the other.


When studying any kind of literature, it is worth looking for the ways in which layers of meaning are being created, shaped or reinforced by this sense of 'binary opposition'. In Simon Armitage's poetry, for instance, you might notice the binary opposition he creates between the ideas we associate or attach to 'sincerity', 'genuineness' and 'truth' because of our culture's utter dislike of their binary opposites, 'insincerity' and 'lies'.


Recognising such binaries can open up the ideas the writer is trying to express. Look out for these oppositions as they can allow a deep understanding of what is happening in the text as well as alerting you to the 'big picture' - what it is all about.