Audience

What is Audience?

• Media is changing what is known as the audience
• Shift from PUSH media (when a producers push media at us and we receive and consume it) to PULL media ( where we decide what we want to do with media and access it in ways that suit us.)
• People are now making and distributing their own videos much more - gone from a VALUE CHAIN (products are made and distributed to audiences) to SOCIAL NETWORK ( Complex system where producers and consumers are mixed up)

How is this a problem for film producers?

 
• Media Producers also consider very carefully how that audience might react to, or engage with, their text. The following are all factors in analysing or predicting this reaction.
• AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT
• This describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text.
• AUDIENCE EXPECTATION
• These are the advance ideas an audience may have about a text. This particularly applies to genre pieces. Don't forget that producers often play with or deliberately shatter audience expectations.
• AUDIENCE FOREKNOWLEDGE
• This is the definite information (rather than the vogue expectations) which an audience bring to a media product.

• Mainstream and Niche
• In this case it is the relationship between the audience and the institution.
• Audience= the ways in which people engage with media
• Institutions are no longer interested in keeping the audience together nut "triggering engagement" in people.

COUNTING AUDIENCES

• Different type of media text measure their audiences in different ways.
• Film figures are based on box office receipts and cinema taking, rather than the numbers of people who have actually seen the movie.
• Subtract the production costs of movie from the box office receipts to find out how much money it made, and therefore how successful it has been in the profit - driven movie business
• Be aware that a film which does not cost much to make (eg The Bair Witch Project) and takes even a modest amount at the box office can be considered a greater success than a big action movie which cost more, has a bigger set of box office receipts ( i.e. lots more people went to see it) but has a smaller profit margin.
• AUDIENCE AND MEDIA PRODUCERS
• AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION
• This is the way in which audiences feel themselves connected to a particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle
• AUDIENCE PLACEMENT
• This is the range of strategies media producers use to directly target a particular audience and make them feel that the media text is specially "for them"
• AUDIENCE RESEARCH
• Measuring an audience is very important to all media institutions. Research is done at all stages of product of a media text, and, once produced, audience will be continually monitored.
• Audience reaction to early versions of a media text is closely watched. Hollywood studios routinely show a pre-release version of every movie they make to a test audience, and will often make changes to the movie that arte requested by that audience.

SYNERGY

• synergy is when the interaction of two or more forces working together creates a greater effect than the sum of their individual efforts.
• Media synergy is the way in which different elements of a media conglomerates work together to promote linked products across different media.
• Synergy works when different elements within a media conglomerate promote (eg. film studio, record label, video game division) create linked products (eg. film, soundtrack, video game0.
• Each distinct element promotes the others