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1. NEA - AUDIENCE
What is a culturally sophisticated AB audience and how do you address one in your music videoand
website production?
Your music video has to appeal to a ‘culturally sophisticated’ AB 16-25 year old audience. This may, at first,
sound quite a daunting task, as an AB audience has quite specific tastes which may be quite different to
your own.
AB refers to the ‘socio economic status (or ‘social grade’)’ that audience members belong to. The social
grade systemwas devised as a classification systemto help media producers understand their audiences’,
tastes, education, spending patterns, interests and media consumption and was divided into the following
groups:
Group Typical employment Percentage of audience that
falls into this group
A Higher managerial, professional (Doctors,
bankers, lawyers)
4%
B Intermediate managerial, professional
(teachers, for example)
23%
C1 Supervisory, clerical, junior management
(supermarket manager, for example)
28%
C2 Skilled manual workers (builders, plumbers
etc)
20%
D Semi-skilled, manual workers (such as shop
workers)
15%
E State pensioners, casual workers, those on
state benefits or unemployed
10%
You’ll notice that ‘student’ doesn’t appear on this table, even though at 16 you are likely to be still in
education, and a lot of young people are in education until 21. This classification systemlooks at parental
education and income and makes assumptions about children in those households, and so your music
video and website needs to appeal to the children of adults in the AB classification.
So, a 16-25 year old AB audience would be from the top ‘quintile’ (top 20%) of the population in terms of
their education, income and occupation, tending to be more highly educated, wealthier professionals. AB
professionals are notoriously ‘hard to reach, hard to please and hard to keep’ according to Campaign.

2. What does ‘culturally sophisticated’ mean?
Media producers make assumptions about audience members in the AB grouping as being quite culturally
savvy and very media literate. They seek out alternatives from the mainstream and are quite sophisticated
in their understanding of and consumption of media products.
You will need to show, in your music video/magazine and website, how media language and
representation can be used in a sophisticated way and how it can be used to appeal to an audience that
enjoys something a little bit different, and to audience who are able to make sense of a range of cultural
references, such as intertextuality. Dance music has a history of producing videos that are a little bit
outside the norm - just think about the David Guetta video that you analysed for your exam.
Probably best to concentrate on using intertextuality and interesting post-production techniques as a way
of appealing to our culturally sophisticated audience.