1. Learning Outcome One: How media producers define their target audience
I am researching documentary media producers and how they define their target audience for their
documentaries.
I will begin by researching different audience profiling methods and will then compare them at the
end talking about which audience profiling methods media producers would use and wouldn’t use
and why.
Audience Profiling:
Audience profiling allows media businesses to narrow down their audience/ customers to find their
target audience. It is always best for a media business to find their target audience before they
market a new product (in our case a documentary) so they can get the best results and profit. A
target audience is an audience that is most relevant and connected to the media product that a
company is trying to sell hence the name target audience.
When a media business is defining an audience to find their target audience some of the factors they
must consider are…
Age
Gender
Religion
Race
Sexuality
Education
Occupation
Annual income
Disposable income
Current and desired lifestyle
Media interests
Buying habits
Loyalty to brands
Quantitative research (TV viewing figures): Quantitativeresearch is a method used by documentary
producers to define their target audience. This method allows media producers to see TV viewing
figures of TV channels. In my opinion this method does not really help much for documentary
producers in finding their target audience because this method just tells you what channels/ TV
programmes receive the most views and doesn’t give you any information about the audience who
watch these channels. Here is a link to a useful website that shows these viewing figures.
http://www.barb.co.uk/
The one way I see Quantitative research being helpful to documentary producers would be the fact
that it tells you how many people are watching a certain channel or TV programme at a certain time.
This can help media producers to define their target audience by finding the peak times of the day
when a maximum amount of people are viewing TV.

2. Qualitative research:Qualitative research is a more upfront and personal method for media
producers to find their target audience. This method requires the media producer or someone
working for them to ask members of the public questions that will help them define their target
audience, this can be done through different techniques such as focus groups, questionnaires or face
to face interviews. In my opinion this audience profiling method is very useful (in particular to
media/ documentary producers) because it allows the media producers to be very detailed in what
they want to find out from the public, some of the questions they could ask would be “what is your
favourite channel?” or “What is your favourite genre of documentary?” . It is also a safer method for
defining the target audience because it gives you fresh information from the public rather than
figures and answers from the internet or books that could easily be outdated.
Socio- economic status research: Socio- economic status is a method used by industries/ businesses
to find the right economic class audience for their target audience. For example you traditionally
have three classes which are upper class, middle class and working class. Upper class composing of
people who are wealthy, well born or both. Middle class consists of people who fall between upper
and working class. Working class are people with low paying jobs.
This method is useless to a documentary producer. The reason for this being for example, a car
company selling expensive cars would immediately focus its target audience at the upper class
individuals. However a documentary/ media producer is simply trying to find a target audience to
advertise to and persuade them to watch their media product on TV. The Broadcasters’ Audience
Research Board (BARB) estimates 26.8 million households (approximately 97% of households) in the
UK own televisions. So the Socio- economic status of the target audience doesn’t matter (for
documentary producers anyway)
Demographics: A very common and traditional method when audience profiling is to use a
demographics chart to narrow down the search for the best target audience. The purpose of a
demographics chart is to define the adult population largely by the work that they do. The
demographic chart breaks the entire population of adults down into six groups. The chart then labels
them by using a letter code that then describes the status and income of the members of each
group.
This audience profiling method is allot more useful to media/ documentary producers than the
socio- economic status research method because rather than just choosing one of the three classes
(upper, middle and working class) they have a march larger variety of choice for finding their target
audience. For example, let’s say a media producer is trying to find the best target audience for a TV
documentary which is about making a creative design for a skyscraper and then building it.
Straightaway the producer can choose two groups that would be a target audience for this
documentary, Bbecause it has a large amount of creative workers in that group who would take
interest in the design and structuring of the skyscraper and C2: Because the builder (other manual
workers too!) would take interest in the building process of the skyscraper.

3. Psychographics:Psychographics are similar to Demographics but that they deal more with the
audience’s behavior and personality rather than the work they do. An eccentric party animal would
sort in a separate group from someone more dependent on security and someone who’s
introverted. Of course, they aren’t meant to be discriminatory. The Demographics describe who the
audiences are whereas the Psychographics explain why they do what they do.
Media producers often use Psychographics graphs to help profile their audience because just like
demographic charts, they are much more detailed and offer a larger variety of audience to choose
from.
For example a documentary producer is looking for a target audience for their documentary which
is about a group of 16-18 year old leaving home and living on their own for the first time having to
pay for themselves with no help from their parents in looking after themselves. The producer would
choose the reformers group because that contains people who want freedom of restrictions
(independence). The producer could also choose the strugglers group for people who are seeking
escape or are disorganised.

4. Age & Gender: Age and Gender are an obvious but major part for audience research. Media/
documentary producers need to have the target aged and gender decided first before they can
define their target audience any further (think of it as the structure of finding your target audience)
It usually depends on the type of documentary the producer is trying to sell/ advertise. For example
if a producer was trying to find a target audience for a documentary looking back at the history of
world Margaret Thatcher they would go for a target audience age of between 40- 60 years old
because those were the people living those days, hence they would be more likely interested in
what the documentary had to say.