To find our audience we had to look into the Uses and Gratification which looks into audience ideology and the reasons they have for consuming media. Blumler and Katz suggest there are four types of reasons active audience seek from the media.

Furthermore, the Stuart Hall Theory helped me understand that an audience decodes what the producer encodes in a text. However, this all depends on:

• Demographics – age, gender
• Psychographics – beliefs, politics, religion
• Cultural competence – their knowledge of ‘stuff’
• Circumstances in which they are consuming the media   

Designing our perfect audience member

We considered these questions

• What platform is your production to be accessed on? Youtube
• What is the product’s function? To promote the message of letting go and drawing a line
• What genre(s) does your artist typically work in? RnB, Pop and Grime
• Who is the target audience?
  • Teenage girls who like to listen to artists such as Jorja Smith and Doja Cat, they like to socialise and they are on social platforms such as youtube a lot.

• Which other bands/artists your audience would be into? Doja Cat, Mahalia and AJ Tracey
• What other media they would consume, fashion tastes, musical genre preferences…
  They would wear the newest trendy clothes and listen to RnB, Pop and Grime
• What are their values, attitudes and beliefs they hold about what’s important in their lives and the world around them? They like being able to socialise with friends and be in relationships or overcome heartbreak which goes well with our narrative.
• What broad demographic groups do your audience fall into?
  Teenage girl audience

We then made a target audience profile in the form of a mood board to present all the research we just covered in one place.

It is important to know our target audience as you can adapt the content of the media you produce to suit the main concerns of your audience. If you know your readers are specialists in a particular area, by knowing the demographics and psychographics can give off a preferred reading to the audience.

This will impact on our own production as our own product will have to include symbols, signs and cultural references which our target audience will be able to read and recognise in order to have a preferred reading of our media.