Media Audiences

In this next part of the essay I will discuss how audiences are classified through, demographics, standard occupational classification, psychographics, lifestyles and other ways of grouping.

Demographics:

Demographics are a form of quantity research that advertisers would use to sell their product.  Most researchers would use the Nation Readership Survey (NRS). They base their target by using the NRS social grading scale. Advertisers would also use other surveys such as ‘The target group index’, and the ‘British market research bureau’.  Some advertisers would target the (A-B) categories this is known as going ‘upmarket’.

Psychographics: 

Psychographics is another form of quantity  research in which advertisers would investigate their audience.  This would usually take in the form of a survey that the public audience would answer.  ‘VAL’ (Values and lifestyles) categorises people on the basis of their succeeds, aspirers, carers, mainstreamers, individualists.  This helps the researchers understand their audiences lifestyles and interests.

Standard Occupational Classification:

Standard occupational classification is a form of quantity research. It groups people based on their occupations, this includes government program managers, industrial and labor practitioners, students considering career training, job seekers, and employers wanting to calculate salary scales.

This system could be used when a company would advertise a job, because they would know who they target audience was by searching the ‘Standard Occupational Classification’.

Office For National Statistics

The ‘Office For National Statistics’ is part of the UK statistics Authority and is a non-ministerial department which reports directly to Parliament. ONS has a data collection which includes...

·      Business and Energy

·      Crime and Justice

·      Economy

·      Health and Social Care

·      Population

·      Travel and Transportation.

Advertisers use the ‘Office For National Statistics’ as a way to separate and categorise their audience.

Lifestyles

Most advertisers will sell you a product based around a lifestyle. For example when Apple released it’s first-generation of the iPod, they gave out there firsts models to celebrates. This sold the Apple’s market audience a lifestyle. Lifestyles also can be based on peoples….

·      Age – Example: Sony would advertise the PlayStation at a young audience. 8-25 because this the age group which has the most spare time, and has more interest in the latest technology.

·      Gender – Example: Diet Coke is advertised for women and Coke Zero is advertised for men, but they both sold as a healthier alternative to Coca Cola.

·      Interests – Example: McDonalds would usually have a movie tie-in to advertise their happy meal, this would include toys based of the films characters. This market is target for children. For example; if a child watched the new ‘Transformers” movie in cinemas, and saw an McDonald’s advertisement for the toy, it would be likely for them to want to have happy meal.

·      Religion: Example: Some locations are seen as sacred ground because of a religious sighting or because of the symbolism of it’s culture. For example an Indian tourist company would advertise India’s religious events such as ‘Holi’ and ‘Thaipusam’ because these events attract a lot of tourists, especially people who are Hindu.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I believe that advertisers find websites like ‘BARB’ and ‘NRS ‘ useful because it’s easier for them to categorise their target audience with the information which is given online.  Although researchers can gain a large amount of quantitate research on these websites, there is little quality research, which is needed for the advertisers to truly understand their audience.