Week 1: Media Studies Introduction: Target Audience

Today I was introduced to the media studies unit of my course. Throughout the course unit we will be looking at Critical Approaches to Media Products. In our lesson today we discussed and learnt about Target Audience. We started to learn about how media producers define their target audience for their products. As the target audience is very important to appeal to for a product, else the product will not sell. We learnt about Audience Classification, which is how media producers define target audiences. The definition of this is that media producers put target audiences into categories and the media producer is then able to categories their certain target audience. Some of these categories include: Age, Gender and Occupation.Many different media producers need to define their target audience including: TV, Advertisers, Magazines and Newspapers. It is important for all media producers to define their target audience, for the product to appeal to the target audience for the product to sell.

I have started my research into my first worksheet about Critical Approaches to Creative Media Products. I have started on task 1 and started research into two companies, BARB and RAJAR, two audience research agencies. I am looking into what the company does, how they are funded, why they collect audience figures and if their work is beneficial to the consumer. I will continue to complete task 1 on the worksheet and write a written document showing my findings about these companies.