UNIT 6 // CRITICAL APPROACHES

Audience Segmentation

Media Audiences are carefully researched and defined (as groups and/or individuals) using a range of categories: Demographics statistically measure the non-psychological attributes of a population. The primary demographic variables are age, gender, ethnicity, income, occupation, geographic location and marital status.

Categories

Audiences can be divided into categories based on social class/grade.

Socio-Economic Groupings

• The NRS social grades were developed by the National Readership Survey to classify magazine and newspaper readers. 
• They are now used by many other organisations and have become a standard for market research. 
• Social grades are based on occupation. The idea being that your occupations also reflects your income and your level of education. 
• The different grades are grouped together, such as ABC1 or C2DE. 
• These are taken to equate to middle class and working class respectively. 
• The occupation of the head of the household determines the social grade of the whole of the household. 

A - Upper Middle Class

B - Middle Class

C1 - Lower Middle Class

C2 - Skilled Working Class

D - Working Class

E - Lowest of the low

Most of the texts have primary and secondary audiences. 

Big Brother will largely attract students and those in groups C2 and D. Given the nature and content of material in the program and the synergy of coverage that Big Brother gets in The Star (also owned by Richard Desmond who controls a large part of Channel 5) you can see how synergy works. This media text is clearly addressing the needs of a certain type of reader/viewer. 

Task A - Targeting and Defining Audiences 

• Identify three different ways that media producers target audiences. 
• Detail fully each form of audience segmentation explaining how it works and what it is based on. 

Demographic segmentation within the media is very easy to identify. Gender, age, income, housing type, and education level are common demographic variables. Some brands are targeted exclusively to women, others only to men. Music streaming services tend to be targeted to the young, while hearing aids are targeted to the elderly. Education levels are often employed to determine market segments. For instance, private elementary schools might define their target market as highly educated households containing women of childbearing age. Demographic segmentation almost always plays some role in a segmentation strategy, particularly in the media. 

Social grade is a classification system based on occupation. It was developed for use on the NRS [National Readership Survey], and for over 50 years NRS has been the research industry's source of social grade data. 

Income is not part of the social grade classification. However there is a strong correlation between income and social grade, for example someone with the profession of a lawyer or a banker would be expected to be in the A grade of the social grade classification. 

Audience Profiling
Media institutions create/develop products/media texts with carefully researched and clearly defined. Target Audience in view. There are many ways of profiling/categorising audiences...

The Times is a broadsheet newspaper - this is the genre. Typically, The Times follows the conventions...

Mainstream Films: The Super Hero Genre

The history and origins of the Marvel Cinematic Universe [MCU] is complex but can be simplified. Marvel Films [Marvel Studios] had been making superhero films since 1993 under the umbrella of their parent company Marvel Entertainment Group (owner of Marvel Comics). They were all distributed by the big six that included Columbia, 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Universal Studios.

Distribution is what makes the big six so powerful because they are integrated vertically/horizontally so well with the audience. 

Marvel Cinematic Universe is a relatively new franchise, formed in 2007. In 1944 Captain America was technically the first film based on Marvel Comics. It was escapist serialised film in 15 chapters designed to be a diversion from America's involvement in the battlegrounds of WW2. 

The distribution rights to Marvel films has changed hands several times but always involving the Big Six. This is safe in the knowledge that despite their significant female and older male secondary target audience, superhero movies are mainstream films, targeting a mass mainstream 12-25 demographic. As such they need wide or saturated distribution. In 2009 this target audience was further acknowledged by the purchase of Marvel Entertainment by the Walt Disney Company for 4 billion dollars, evidencing a form of horizontal integration but also assuring additional merchandising and synergy. 

Conglomerates: The Big Six

Later in 2010 Disney bought the distribution rights for Marvel's The Avengers and Iron Man 3 from Paramount Pictures, thus centralising the power of franchise, albeit under Disney's ownership. Since 2012, with Marvel's The Avengers, Disney has exclusively distributed all Marvel Cinematic Universe productions. Disney has also been able to further consolidate with film licensing deals such as bringing Spider-Man into the MCU from Columbia (Sony). 

It is hardly surprising that for the MCU, the plans are to make more films. They are officially the highest grossing film franchise in the world, ahead of the following impressive competition:

• MCU $7.78bn
• Harry Potter $7.72bn
• James Bond $6.1bn
• Middle Earth $5.8bn
• Star Wars $4.3bn

It is the ability of MCU to continually produce superhero films..

MCU is now a huge commercially successful franchise that has a primary target audience that reflects the typical multiplex cinema going demographic, the 12-25 male. This suggests MCU can be understood simply as mainstream franchise that caters for mass audiences with films distributed by The Big Six in terms of Hollywood linking. This description fails to acknowledge the more niche appeal to Marvel's superhero films with, as identified earlier, the older male with cultural capital but also the female fan. Yes, Thor is stereotypically male, Tony Stark has dashing good looks and Captain America represents the ideal of America saving the world but films also have strong, albeit at times objectified, female characters. 

MCU has a long list of female characters, many who possess considerable power, including power over men but who are clearly sexualised. In the Avengers films characters include Black Widow, Peggy Carter, Jane Foster, Maria Hill and Peppa Potts, all independent of men and integrative to the film's narrative. It will be interesting to see how Captain Marvel is represented and how she is "given over" to audiences who are used to dominant male leads. 

This is evidence of Marvel Studios paying attention to their direct audience and adjusting the dominant gender roles for the benefit of their growing female followers.

Using Jeremy Tunstall's theory, Star Trek Into Darkness had a primary, secondary, and tertiary target audience - it's primary audience was action and science fiction fans (hybrid genre), mainstreamers with a C1, C2, D, 12-35 male skew. They are highly likely to have seen the previous film and are fans of high production value, Hollywood blockbusters that are fast paced and use a lot of technology and CGI, e.g. the Transformers audience. The secondary target audience were male, female, 25-45 C1, C2, D mainstreamers who were targeted using character, narrative and in particular the emotive nature of the narrative and in particular the emotive nature of the narrative. Notions of the star marketing and the female gaze would also apply to actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch and Chris Pine while young male audiences may be attracted to Zoe Saldana in terms of the female gaze (star marketing would also relate to the Director, JJ Abrams). The tertiary target audience were fans of the franchise with significant cultural capital e.g. 'Trekkies' or 'Geeks' aged 35-55, with a male skew, individualists again, C1, C2, and D.

Task B: Understand how media audiences respond to media products 

Signs and symbols in media texts are polysemic, which means they're open to many interpretations. The different possible meanings in media texts depend on two things. The first is the way the signs and symbols in the text are 'read'. The second is the cultural background of the person "reading" the text. 

Image analysis in film and television means teasing out the way meaning comes across through the pictures and through the words or dialogue. Meaning is conveyed through media languages which can be verbal and non-verbal, visual and aural. Seeing the characters in a moving image text allows meaning to come across as non verbal communication. This includes the gestures, facial expressions, clothing and props in a film as well as where the characters are placed in the frame. 

Hypodermic Needle Model Theory

The hypodermic needle model is a theory about audiences. The idea is that media messages are directly received and accepted by the audience. The theory implies that mass media has a direct, immediate and powerful effect on its audience. 

This theory suggests that an audience will simply do as it is told, without thinking about it. It suggests a passive audience, one that does not apply its own thinking to the messages that it receives. This caused a great deal of concern as radio and television became widely accessible forms of media. 

The theory has been largely disproved and more complex theories have been developed which take in to account the audiences ability to make rational judgements based upon their own experiences. 

Bandura and Bobo The Doll

The experiment was conducted in laboratory conditions so that the environment could be controlled. One group of children were shown a video in which an adult strikes a doll with a mallet. The control group were shown a neutral video. Both groups of children were then placed in a room containing (amongst other things) a mallet and an identical doll to the one used in the video. It was found that those children who had seen the "violent" video were more likely to strike the doll. The experimenters concluded that this demonstrated that watching violence makes us more likely to be violent. 

Criticisms of the experiment 

• Experimenter expectation: the children believed that they were supposed to strike the doll. 
• Striking a doll with a hammer is not violence - it is not the equivalent of copying an assault on a person. 
• Can an experiment replicate real life?
• The effects are short term.
• Media products rarely show violence that is not punished. 
• There are lots of experiments, many of which are not as methodologically flawed as Bandura's, however, the more effective the methodology the less conclusive the results have been. 

Actor Audience Reception Theory 

In reality we are all the "audience" day in and day out. Active audience reception theory is the notion that audiences don't just absorb everything they are told but are actually involved, sometimes unconsciously, in making sense of any given message as it relates to them in their own personal contexts. People may interpret a message a certain way just from their own cultural background differently from someone else with a completely different background. These same people see multiple signs and symbols as they take in information throughout the day, whether they know it or not to make interpretations. Texts are polysemic. 

Proponents of active audience theory claim that scholars cannot assume that the meaning of a text is fixed in advance of its reception because meaning the product of a negotiation between the audience and the text in a particular context of reception. They argue that people use the media for their own purposes (uses and gratifications).

Audience Response Theory 

Stuart Hall concluded that audiences played a much more active role in receiving media and messages. People were no longer viewed as sponges that just soaked all the information in. Instead, the relationship between author, text and reader is how meaning was created. The ultimate meaning the text took on was created by the experience of the reader. 

Fandom

Fans are those who identify with the enthusiastic engagement with a text. This text might be a book series, a TV show, a sporting team, or a fashion label. If we think about ways of theorizing identity, we can start to see that "fan" is an identity option that an individual can choose to deploy based on actual or perceived feedback from others. Fandom is often a shared identity performance. 

Prosumers take the idea of the active audience to a whole new level. In the age of the mass audience, the active audience was seen as someone yelling back at the screen, or talking about what they had seen or heard over the watercolor at work or school the following morning. And that still happens. But now, thinking of audiences also as an aggregate of users means that the active audiences not only talk back to the screen - they use screens to construct their own texts in a process of bricolage and re-consumption. 

Theories That Apply 

• The ideas of autonomy and control can also be applied to the users of internet websites, where there is a wealth of information and experience at your fingertips. But everyone will use the internet in a different way. 
• The ways in which audiences are offered opportunities to use texts and become active is changing how we analyse audience responses. 
• "Uses and Gratifications" is one of the more useful theories as it assumes an active (rather than passive) audience and emphasises what the media texts do with them rather than what the media does to the audience. However, the theory must be used with reservations as not all audiences have the needs suggested or use the media in this way. Bummer and Katz disagreed with earlier theories which placed the audience as a passive mass who could be influenced and would act upon messages communicated by the media. 
• The Uses and Gratifications theory suggests that individuals and social groups use texts in different ways and the audience is no longer viewed as passive receiver.  

Uses and Gratifications 

• The identified needs of an audience were later refined as:
• Entertainment and diversion - a form of escape from the pressures of everyday life. 
• Personal relationships (social interaction - identification with characters and being able to discuss media texts with others).
• Personal Identity - the ability to compare your life with that of characters and situations presented in media texts. 
• Information/Education - to find out and learn about what is going on in the world. 

Audiences 

It is important to move away from the idea that the meaning within texts is already embedded and unchanging and that all audiences respond to messages in title same way. 

Audiences are made up of individuals who bring social and cultural experiences to their interpretation of any text which may alter the messages they receive from the text. Audiences are not unquestioning consumers as has been suggested by theories in the past. 

New Media and Audiences 

New Media challenges notions of ownership with more control being passed to audiences. As Dan Gilmour suggested with citizen journalism and blogging changing the way news production and reporting is handled, film and television audiences have changed from passive to active - there is more connectivity through social networks with potentially online gaming and vast communities paving the way in the first instance for other media. 

Ownership 

• For the moment offline media and online media coexist with online opportunities as available to independent media producers as much as there are to larger institutions. 
• Ownership is a factor and it's impact and needs to be referenced - from Google and Facebook to Amazone and Netflix - horizontal integration and synergy is as much a part of online media than offline with all media having major conglomerates as key players e.g. in music Sony, Universal and Warner Bros., Sony and Universal acquired the music video website Vevo streaming music from the major record labels. 
• In print media, newspaper brand identity is still strong but with lower circulation figures and less advertising revenue with the wide proliferation of online sources of news one factor. Again, with online news content convergent links allow for diversification. Online media also facilitates the concept of the global village with communication and interactivity across geographical boundaries but still with much cultural output "coming from the west" and dominating online.