Targeting a specific audience
Possible exam question: To what extent does attitude targets multiple audiences?
Audience targeting refers to how a producer addresses a particular audience. Every media product will have a target audience, and these should be as specific as possible.
There are two explicit reasons why producers must target a specific audience rather than anyone and everyone:
- To allow the target audience to identify with, and to engage with the media product. This means that he will hopefully keep buying it, and
- To sell advertising space to advertisers who will be able to target this audience
This second point is particularly important to understand. It is often said that media products are not in the business of selling a product, they are instead in the business of selling audiences. If a media producer can say to an advertiser "Attitude online's audience are gay men, working class, aged 25 - 50, aspirational, interested in holidays, fashion and the theatre, and with a larger expendable income than average", then advertisers can use targeted adverts with confidence.
Task - open Attitude Online (you must be very familiar with it by now!)
find specific examples of how Attitude online targets the following audience:
- "Gay men, working class, aged 25 - 50, aspirational, interested in holidays, fashion and the theatre, and with a larger expendable income than average"
You can and should make reference to anything and everything from the textual analysis toolkit, and, in particular, to advertisements and advertising features
Audience theory activity
In order to test your knowledge of audience theory, match the following statements to the following theories.
15 - Media effects - Albert Bandura
16 - Cultivation theory - George Gerbner
17 - Reception theory - Stuart Hall
18 - Fandom - Henry Jenkins
19 - ‘End of audience’ theories - Clay Shirky
- Audiences are likely to be influenced by an ideology after being exposed to it over time
- Audiences can form an intense bond with a media product, and use it to define their life
- Audiences can increasingly 'speak back' to a media product, and are more of a producer than an audience member
- Media products can easily manipulate the ideology of an audience member
- Audiences can chose many different ways to how they respond to the ideology of the producer
You can check your answer in the theories and theorists section of this blog
The othering of gay audiences and queer readings
Audiences can negotiate with media products in many different ways. Last time, we considered the fact that we live in a heteronormative world, where it is assumed, by and large that people are heterosexual. This cultivates and normalises heterosexuality as a dominant ideological discourse, while also othering gay people as being different and 'abnormal'.
Below is an LGBT DVD display from FOPP in Covent Garden
- What assumptions, messages and ideological values are constructed by placing 'gay' films separate from other films?
- This section includes historical dramas, documentaries, comedies, romance films and hard hitting dramas. Why are all in the same section? What assumptions does this make about gay audiences?
- If I were to ask you "what is your favourite heterosexual film", how would you answer?
- How can we apply postcolonial theory to this display?
- Why do we arguably need LGBT sections? You may wish to check your notes on visibility from the previous session
Gregg Araki (possibly the greatest living film director in the world, fyi) makes fun of heteronormativity in his absolutely incredible post-apocalyptic homoerotic road movie The Doom Generation (1995) by announcing the audience are about to watch "A HETEROSEXUAL MOVIE". It draws attention to the assumptions that we make about films, and how we unwittingly use sexuality as a genre convention. It aso indicates the frustration that queer audiences feel by not being represented on screen.
Many television networks, particularly in America, which tends to be more conservative in its representations, have previously avoided depicting gay characters for fear of upsetting and alienating straight audiences. The 1994 TV series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, while mainly depicting heterosexual relationships later on depicted a same sex relationship, and became on of the first network TV shows in America to depict two women kissing. It hardly seems noteworthy now, but Buffy is still talked of fondly by LGBT audiences
