Researching Audiences

Stuart hall – Hall views audiences as both the producers and consumers of texts: decoding the meaning encoded by the originator of the text. His approach to textual analysis is that the consumer actively negotiates the meaning.

Research methods

How do we measure audiences?

Sales, subscriptions, ratings and figures

Who measures audiences?

NRS, ABC, BARB, Bookseller

New Media

New ways to measure audience – Facebook, twitter, online forums, YouTube, Google, twitter trends.

Research

Quantitative research e.g. questionnaires

Number based

Closed questions to generate exact answers.

Very factual

Qualitative Research e.g. interviews, focus groups

Analysis of existing products

Open questions to generate answers open to interpretation

Individual preferences

Considering Audiences

Audience Engagement – This describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text.

Audience Expectations – These are the ideas the audience have in advance of seeing media text. This particular applies to genre pieces. Don’t forget producers continually play with or shatter audience expectations

Audience Foreknowledge – this is definitive information that audiences bring to a media product (rather than vague expectations).

Audience Identification – this is the way audiences feel themselves connected to a particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle.

Audience Placement – search it up ben

Audience Research – search it up ben

Look up and research and copy and paste USP – Unique selling point