Media Revision

Industries tend to categorise their audiences in terms of income, lifestyle and needs. They can also define them through their values, attitudes and lifestyle (VALs) or through the 4c's (cross, consumer, characterstics and culture). These catogorisation methods make up both the psychometric and demographic profiling methods.

Representation is the aspects of society, including gender, age, ethnicity and national/local identity, are presented to an audience by specific media texts. These representations are a creation from the media and are mediated within texts not being a ‘ window on the world’, creating stereotypes amongst people. These representations are encoded within the text by the producers, which are then decoded by the audience who interprets the text.

The relationship between the media text and the audience is fluent and changing. An audience is made up of individuals whose social and cultural experiences may affect how they respond to texts. An audience is the ways in media texts target and appeal to a certain audience. Media texts/ industries are aware of their audience and they know the strategies to attract them.