The most important source of
revenue for a media house is through its advertisers. For advertisers, media is
the most used and the most important medium for propagating and communicating
about their products. But, no media business can exist without content that
attracts consumers, or audiences, because audiences are those people to whom a
media product is directed. Advertisers are keenly aware that the kinds of
content they produce, distribute and exhibit must be attractive to audiences if
money is to flow their way instead of to their competitors.
Though advertisers and media
outlets are mutually helpful to each other, but their main target audiences are
the customers, who depending on the advertisements decide upon their interests
and preferences and then respond positively to these advertisements. This
generates profits for the advertising company, which in turn is the major
source of revenue for the media house.
For example, suppose ‘Pantaloons’
has a deal with the leading English daily ‘ The times of India’, then the
readers who subscribe the newspaper will notice the advertisement of that
particular brand also. This, as described earlier will be useful for both
advertisers and media house.
But there are many difficulties
associated while identifying the potential customers. The three main issues of
concern for media executives are-
- How should we think about our audience? How should we define our audience?
- Will the material we are thinking of creating, distributing, or exhibiting to attract that audience generate adequate revenues?
- Were the people we thought would be attracted to our products in fact attracted to our products? Why or why not?
Executives who are charting the
direction of media firms do not think about the members of their audience in
the same way that they think about themselves. Take, for example, Kritika has a
number of attributes associated with her, from physical to financial to
emotional and many other factors. So, it becomes really difficult for the
executives to know her personally. In fact, they are not really thinking
specifically about Kritika at all. Instead, the characteristics that describe
Kritika for a particular media are those that the media executives can use when
they parade clusters of readers in front of potential advertisers as types of people
the advertisers can reach through their media. Now, there might be some of her
attributes which might make her attractive to a particular brand and certain
other attributes to some other brand. These are the attributes that major
advertisers consider when they think about buying space in media like
newspapers, magazines, television and other medium of broadcasting. Now let’s
consider an example, If Kritika is a 21 year old fashion designing student,
then her course and her age might be useful for certain clothing lines and if
she is a student who is staying alone in a city away from her parents and is
financially unstable, then certain ads for educational loans and other
financial aid might be useful for her.
But how does the media house
identify such characteristics of the audience?
They do it through certain
research, surveys and questionnaires. They even get some of their data from
lists that are bought from the companies that bring together information about
millions of people and sell that information to media firms.
Since , media outlets gets at
least half of its revenue from advertising, its executives wants to keep
subscribers who are attractive to advertisers, so they use the information they
have about their subscribers that they have identified as being attractive to
advertisers, to help them decide what kinds of materials in that particular
media will keep these people as subscribers. These identified and selected
population segments, then become the desired audience for the media vehicle.
Once executives have identified the target segments, they try to learn things
about them that will lead to increasing sales. That, in turn leads to more
research to understand the groups.
For example, suppose Vaishali is a subscriber
to a lifestyle magazine and she has some particular interests. Now, if the
magazine is unable to produce content that will keep her glued to the magazine,
she will cancel her subscription, which is not good for the business of the
magazine.
Thinking about the audience, then,
means learning to think of people primarily as consumers of media materials and
other products. For media professionals, thinking about people in this way
requires a combination of intuition and solid knowledge of the marketplace.
When advertisers contribute all or part of a firm’s revenue stream, the firm’s
executives have two challenges:
- They have to create content that will attract audiences,
- And they must also make sure that the content and the audience it brings in will be attractive to advertisers so that money flows its way, instead of to its competitors.
Sometimes, in fact media
executives reverse the order of the questions. They first ask which audiences
advertisers want to reach, and then look for ways to attract those audiences.
For example, a particular channel has a time slot which caters to a particular
genre of viewers, let’s take the channel ‘ Colors’ for instance, the 7-10 pm
slot is covered by basically housewives and some young girls who prefer
watching television serials. Now, the advertisers covet that particular group,
so the important job for the production firms that work with the network is to
come up with ideas that will be magnet to that age group.
Therefore, many companies spend a
lot of energy deciding which audiences they should pursue ,what those
audiences’ characteristics are, and what those audiences like and don’t like.
Executives try to verify their intuitions and control their risks with
research. In conducting this research, they think about the types of people who
make up their audience- that is, they construct their audience- in three
different ways which will be explained below with greater detail:
DEMOGRAPHICS: It refers to the characteristics by which
people are divided into particular social categories. It’s one of the simplest
and most common ways to construct audiences. Media executives focus on those
characteristics, or factors, which they believe are most relevant to
understanding how and why people use their medium. Demographic indicators
include such factors as age, gender, occupation, ethnicity, race, and income.
There can be various sub-categories or variants in these demographic
characteristics.
PSYCHOGRAPHICS: It’s a way to differentiate among people or
groups by categorizing them according to their attitudes, personality types, or
motivation. It denotes the grouping of people into homogeneous segments on the
basis of above said factors. They classify people according to their attitude
towards life and their purchasing habits.
LIFESTYLE CATEGORIES: The third
broad way to describe media audiences is by using lifestyle categories- finding
activities in which potential audiences are involved that mark them as
different from others in the audience or in the population at large. This kind
of segmentation is determined by a large number of variables that may be
categorized as purchase occasions, benefits sought, user status, or user age
rate.
