RESEARCH: AUDIENCE

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Types of Audience Research

There are different ways of profiling audiences for example using socioeconomics, demographics and psychographics:

Demographics largely defines audiences by the work they do using a letter code that indicates the income they receive and status they have.

Demographics

Psychographics portrays an audience by looking at the behaviour and personality traits of its members. Psychographics label a specific type of person and make an assessment about their viewing and spending habits. The advertising agency Young and Rebican (found HERE) made an interesting and successful psychographic profiles being known as their 4C’s Marketing Model standing for Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation putting audiences into groups with labels that suggest their position in society.

Psychographics

Exit Polls

The BFI carries out exit polls to assess and gage audience response at film screenings. Below is one example:

I used the online presenting tool, Emaze, to showcase my research instead. Firstly, I used the BFI exit polls and picked 7 thriller, detective films that I thought my target audience would be likely to watch and find out how big their audiences are, for example separating the data found by age and gender. This is known as quantitative research. I then found out qualitative research on the 7 films I had chosen from the BFI exit polls, looking at audience feedback on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. 

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Why audiences consume texts: the use and gratifications model 

The uses and gratifications model of audience behaviour (Blumler and Katz, 1974) explains out higher order needs. In the 1960s it became apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society: surveillance, correlation, entertainment, cultural transmission. Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded Laswell's theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text (uses and gratifications) for Diversion (escape from everyday problems and routine), Personal Relationships (emotional and  interaction), Personal Identity (finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts), Surveillance (information useful for living such as weather reports, financial news).

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The Media Effects Model

The Media Effects Model is also called the Hypodermic Effective Syringe Model, it assumes that people are passive, heterogeneous recipients of media texts, unmediated and manipulated, taking the meaning of texts as the truth. Dating from the 1920s, this theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media such as through media campaigns such as Lord Kitchener's World War One poster announcing "Your Country Needs You" through the use of propaganda.

Lord Kitchener's poster

This is a GIF of the Hypodermic Effective Syringe Model. 

This is my GIF

Below is a Calameo presentation on how I made my GIF.

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Stan Cohen who established Moral Panic

Moral Panic


Moral Panic in an established term, both in academic studies and commonly used vocabulary, used to refer to anti-social or criminal behaviours. Moral Panic refers to an exaggerated and dramatic reaction from the media, the police or wider public, to the activities of particular social groups. This exaggerated response to a socially problematic behaviour indicated an over-reaction due to social media or social institutions. For Stan Cohen, a theorist in the 1970s who studied youth subcultures, moral panic leads to a social group being viewed by the wider audience as 'folk devils'.

http://www.oocities.org/cohen_moralpanic/stockwell.jpg 

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