Audiences for Media.

• You will research reasons why different types of people prefer certain texts. 

Key Terms: Consumer, Target Audience.

Audience; 

The people who will buy the media product, the ones the product is aimed at.

Sport for boys, romance for women, the Times for business people.

Media Audiences an Introduction 

The National Readership Survey  (NRS)

The National Readership Survey was established in 1956 and today provides the most authoritative and valued audience research in use for print and digital advertising trading in Britain.

The survey covers over 250 of Britain’s major newsbrands and magazines, showing the size and nature of the audiences they achieve.

What does ABC1 mean?

National Readership Survey (NRS) is a non-profit but commercial British survey concerned with monitoring, analyzing and providing estimates on the number and nature of people who read Britain’s newspapers and consumer magazines.

Demographic classifications in the UK refer to the social grade definitions, which are used to describe, measure and classify people of different social grade and income and earnings levels, for market research, social commentary, lifestyle statistics, and statistical research and analysis.

The social grade definitions by the NRS are widely used as a generic reference series for classifying and describing social classes, especially for consumer targeting and consumer market research by the advertising UK media and publishing sectors.

National Readership Survey (NRS) demographic categories

Social Grade	Social Status	Occupation
A	Upper middle class	Higher managerial, Lawyers, Doctors, Scientists
B	Middle class	Intermediate managerial, Teachers, Small business owners
C1	Lower middle class	White collar workers, junior managerial, Nurses, Bank Clerks
C2	Skilled working class	Blue collar workers, skilled manual workers, Joiners, plumbers, electricians
D	Working class	Semi and unskilled manual workers, drivers, post office
E	Those at lowest level of subsistence	State pensioners or widows (no other earner), casual or lowest grade workers, Students

Task 1: Using this link to NRS website, navigate to the results of the research for statistics for women's magazines.

Find then write down three statistics for Chat magazine researched between July 2013 and June 2014.

Task 2:

Identify ONE text that each NRS category of audience would consume. A - B - C1 - C2 - D - E. 
In carrying out this task you should consider:

• Disposable income.
• The amount of free time and when that occurs for each group.
• How that group spend their time.

Write neatly in your orange books.

Audiences 2

EFFECTS THEORY: 

The ‘Frankfurt School’ is the term given to a group of social scientists who were originally based at the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt. They conducted research into the potential power the mass media had over audiences.

They were concerned that the media could be used as a tool of fascist propaganda. The founders were left-wing (Marxist) and criticised the capitalist system controlling the mass media for creating a mass culture that eliminated any opposition or alternatives.

This group was responsible for the ‘HYPODEMIC NEEDLE MODEL’ believing that the mass audience were passive and could simply be ‘injected’ with messages created by media producers.

Even though some critics still believe that there is some truth to this model (hence why age restrictions exist and some products are banned completely) others felt that this model over simplifies the situation.

USES AND GRATIFICATION THEORY: 

Audience Pleasures.

Simply means ‘the reasons audiences like programmes’. Basically, what enjoyment do we get out of these shows? When it comes to comedy programmes you might think the answer is simple - because they make us laugh, but in this case, there is so much more to it. How do they make us laugh? Why do we like laughing? What is so funny about the funny things? 

This theory is the opposite of effects theory because it relies on the premise that audiences have free will and choose to consume certain things for different reasons. The theory was developed in the 1960s and was in expanded in 1974 by Blumer and Katz who suggested a series of possible reasons why audience members might consume a media text:

• Diversion (escape from everyday problems - emotional release, relaxing, filling time etc).

• Personal relationships (using the media for emotional and other interactions e.g. substitution soap opera for family life OR using the cinema as a social event).

• Personal identity (constructing their own identity from characters in media texts, and learning behavior and values – useful if trying to fit into a new country/culture)

• Surveillance (information gathering e.g. news, educational programming, weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains etc).Learning Objective - To understand the term ‘audience pleasure’ and to be familiar with the various pleasured offered by comedy programmes

Task 3: 

Create a table with 3 columns and 5 rows in your orange books.

Give the columns headings  NRS - TEXT - U&GT

In the first column, NRS, write the five categories of social class; a, b, c1, c2, d, e

In the second column, TEXT, write down a text that that category might enjoy. Be specific, TV is not a text.

In the third column, U&GT, write down why the type of people would consume that text/