The Game of Thrones series, known for its dark tone and often sexual and violent themes, appeals to certain niche audiences. Here, cast and crew members of the HBO show answer questions onstage during a tour in Belfast.
PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo
Key Idea: The mass media divide the general population into marketing niches then construct niche audiences by creating special content to attract certain kinds of people to each niche so that access to those audiences can be sold to advertisers.
· The Shift from Mass to Niche Perspective on Audience
o What Is a Mass Audience?
o Rejection of the Idea of Mass Audience
o The Idea of Niche Audiences
· Identifying Niches
o Geographic Segmentation
o Demographic Segmentation
o Social Class Segmentation
o Geodemographic Segmentation
o Psychographic Segmentation
§ Twelve American Lifestyles
§ VALS Typology
· Attracting Audiences
o Appeal to Existing Needs and Interests
o Cross-Media and Cross-Vehicle Promotion
· Conditioning Audiences
· Summary
· Further Reading
· Exercises
Alan and Jean were having coffee when Alan started to complain, “I’m starting to feel old these days.”
“Oh, Alan, don’t be ridiculous. You’re not old. You still have all your hair and it hasn’t even started to turn gray. You don’t even need to wear glasses yet.”
“I know that, but I still am feeling old.”
“Are you starting to have mysterious aches and pains?”
“No. I feel fine.”
“Is it hard for you to wake up in the morning and have enough energy to get through the day?”
“No. I still have lots of energy.”
Jean was frustrated, “I don’t get it. Why are you feeling old?”
“Well, it’s my favorite shows on television.”
“Are they being canceled?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s the ads in my shows. All the ads are for old people products like Geritol, denture cream, electric wheelchairs, retirement cruises; stuff like that!”
“Is that all that is bothering you?” Jean replied, feeling relieved. “That’s no big deal. You can easily fix that. I had that same feeling last year and all I needed to do was watch other shows.”
“What shows?”
“There are lots of shows with ads for cheap trucks, beer, and fast food.”
“Watching those shows helped you feel young again?”
“Yes, it did. I no longer think about whether I have enough health insurance when I’m retired and whether I should strap on a diaper when I go to bed.”
“That is so awesome, dude!” Alan was already feeling younger.
“Of course, there is one problem with this,” said Jean. “The shows you have to watch seem so juvenile and silly.”
The media construct audiences so they can sell advertisers access to those audiences. In constructing those audiences, the media focus on particular niches so they can provide content that serves a need that is not already being met. They attract particular kinds of people into those audiences and then condition them for repeat exposures. In this chapter, we will examine the strategies that media businesses use to attract and condition audiences for repeat exposures. But first, we need to examine the more fundamental issue: how the mass media businesses have shifted their perspective on the audience away from it being a mass and toward it being a wide variety of smaller niche audiences.
THE SHIFT FROM MASS TO NICHE PERSPECTIVE ON AUDIENCE
Media programmers no longer think of the audience as a large general mass of people that includes everyone. Instead, they think of audiences as many niches of smaller, specialized sets of people defined by their particular interests.
What Is a Mass Audience?
The term mass communication came into use about a century ago, when social philosophers were arguing that newspapers, magazines, and books communicated their ideas to all audience members in roughly the same way. An essential component of mass communication was the idea of a mass audience, which regarded every person in the entire population as having the same needs for information and entertainment. It then followed that if a particular media message worked well with one person, it would work well with all people. Thus, the term mass was used in a qualitative way instead of a quantitative way, meaning it referred to a certain type of audience instead of the size of the audience. This shift away from a quantitative indicator solved the problem of determining how large an audience needed to be in order to be considered a mass audience; no one had been able to determine that magic threshold below which audiences were too small to be considered a mass.
At first, this shift to a qualitative perspective on the audience seemed to be an improvement over trying to figure out a quantitative threshold. The basis for this shift in thinking arose out of scholars noticing profound changes in societies that were experiencing the industrial revolution, which began in the mid-1800s in the United States and Western European countries. Because these countries were heavily industrialized, it was believed that this technological progress had shaped the lives of people in ways that were not in evidence in less-industrialized countries. Sociologists observed that in less-industrialized societies, people were tightly integrated into social networks in which they interacted continually with others on a daily basis. In industrialized societies, most people worked in factories doing jobs that rendered them extensions of machines because of the repetitive specialized tasks they performed. Sociologists believed that the industrial revolution had created a mass society; that is, while factories produced standardized products, they also were standardizing society. They believed that the industrialization of work, where most people labored in factories at 9-to-5 jobs, had served to turn people into parts of a machine in a mass society that had four characteristics (Blumer, 1946). First, although society is heterogeneous (i.e., composed of a mix of people, regardless of gender, ethnic background, or any other characteristic), everyone had been transformed into one lifestyle. Second, the individuals in a mass society were anonymous to media businesses and advertisers. The message designers didn’t know the names of anyone in the audience—nor did they care to—because the designers regarded everyone to be the same and interchangeable. Third, there was no interaction among the members in the audience. People didn’t talk to each other about the media messages, so the meanings of messages did not get discussed and modified in conversations. Instead, those messages had a direct effect on each person in a uniform manner. And fourth, the mass audience had no social organization, no body of custom and tradition, no established set of rules or rituals, no organized group of sentiments, and no structure or status roles.
Because it was believed that communication did take place in a mass-like fashion, it was assumed that each media message reached everyone in the same way and was processed by everyone in the same manner. It was also believed that the processing itself was very simple; that is, people were vulnerable and had few psychological defenses against messages because they did not discuss messages with other people.
As evidence for this position, social critics pointed to the way that Adolph Hitler used the mass medium of radio in the 1930s to mobilize the German population to support him. Kate Smith’s radio telethons for war bonds, in which she raised millions of dollars, were also offered as evidence that people were highly susceptible to media messages. Another often-cited example of the public’s seeming lack of defense against media messages is provided by the widespread reaction to Orson Welles’s 1939 Mercury Theater presentation of War of the Worlds, which was a fictional radio play presented as if it were a real newscast. Initial reports of listener reactions to the radio play indicated that everyone was panicked by the belief that Martians were landing in New Jersey. These examples stimulated many sociologists to warn the population about the dangers of mass communication throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
As scholars analyzed the power of the mass media more carefully, they began to reject the idea that the mass media were exercising a powerful influence on a defenseless mass society. A more careful analysis of the three examples mentioned above revealed that most people were not affected by those messages (Cantril, 1947). Furthermore, it was later shown that the people who were affected were not all affected in the same manner nor did they all react in the same way. Thus, the idea of mass audience and its supporting belief that all audience members reacted to the messages in the same way started breaking down.
Rejection of the Idea of a Mass Audience
By the 1950s, it became apparent to many scholars that the assumption of the audience as a mass was incorrect. Friedson (1953) was the first to criticize this view of the audience. He argued that people attended movies, listened to the radio, and watched television within an interpersonal context. Discussions of media material frequently took place before, during, and after exposure. He acknowledged that there was a well-developed web of organized social relationships that existed among audience members. This social environment continually influenced what audience members exposed themselves to and how messages affected them. Media behavior was merely a part of their more general social behavior. Friedson warned that “the concept of mass is not accurately applicable to the audience” (p. 316). Since Friedson made this point, many other researchers have supported this position (Bauer & Bauer, 1960).
Today, the term mass communication is still used, but there is no evidence to support the belief in a mass audience. Instead, there are many audiences, some with structures and leadership and others without these characteristics. While people may be isolated from one another across niches, they use the media to communicate a lot with people within their niches or networks. Also, it is very rare for a media event to attract everyone. Even with events such as the Super Bowl, less than half of all Americans watch. And more importantly, the people who do watch the Super Bowl do not all experience the same thing. Some viewers are elated as their team is winning, others are depressed as their team is losing, some are happy that there is a reason to party, and others have no idea which teams are playing the game. There is little common experience. Also, during the viewing, people talk to each other and help each other interpret events.
While the concept of a mass audience still exists, most media companies have started targeting individuals and more niche audiences to better market to specific experiences rather than a group mindset.
iStock.com/xavierarnau
The Idea of Niche Audiences
Mass media programmers and product marketers have long ago abandoned the idea of mass audience. They know that it is foolhardy to attempt to sell a particular product, service, or media message to everyone. Instead, media programmers constructed special kinds of messages to appeal to particular kinds of people: niche audiences. Once a media business identified a potential niche audience, it created messages specially designed to attract that kind of person. When a media business was successful in attracting enough people from that niche audience to its messages, it was able to start attracting advertisers. The media business would sell access to advertisers who wanted to get their persuasive messages in front of the people in a particular niche audience in order to condition them to buy their products and services. Thus, media programmers are in the business of constructing niche audiences. For example, if a website designer wants to attract an upscale, highly educated, professional audience, the designer must identify an interest these people would have—for example, an interest in golf. The web designer would then need to create content that would satisfy a need that these people have that is not already being met by other websites, cable television networks, magazines, and books. The web designers must then find out where this potential audience is spending its time with the media and put ads in those media messages to attract those people to their newly designed website that presents users with lots of information about golf. Once the website starts attracting these golfing enthusiasts, the website’s sales staff will try to sell access to this audience to certain advertisers, such as luxury car dealers, jewelers, travel agencies, and stores that sell golf equipment.
Each person is a member of many different niche audiences. You are a member of a local community that newspapers, radio stations, and cable television franchises target. You are a member of virtual communities when you get on the internet—communities that quickly form and may last for only one evening or may last for years. You are a member of hobby groups that are targeted by certain websites and magazines, although other members of your audience are spread out all over the world and will never meet you in person.
Compare & Contrast Mass Audience and Niche Audience
Compare: Mass audience and niche audience are the same in the following ways:
· Both are conceptions of the audience for mass media messages.
· Both are used by marketers to build their strategies for attraction, holding audiences’ attention, and conditioning them for repeated exposures.
Contrast: Mass audience and niche audience are different in the following ways:
· Mass audience is conceptualized as the full variety of everyone in a population whereas a niche audience is conceptualized as a small set of people who all share some characteristic, such as a particular lifestyle, hobby, or interest.
· Mass audience uses an industrial-type conceptualization where the mass media are viewed as a factory that produces standardized products for everyone whereas a niche audience views the audience in a more personal way, where differences across people are important as far as their needs for information and products.
· Mass audience is an old, outdated way to think of audiences whereas niche audience is a valid way to think of audiences now.
IDENTIFYING NICHES
A major challenge for media programmers is to identify potential audience niches that they can use to achieve their business purposes. In order to meet this challenge, they begin by trying to divide the total population into meaningful segments. Then they select the segments—niches—of interest to them and develop messages to try to attract people from those niches to expose them to the messages they create.
Over the years, audience segmentation schemes have become more numerous and more complex in an effort to generate more precise groupings. This is illustrated by showing the development of thinking over five types of segmentation methods: geographic, demographic, social class, geodemographic, and psychographic.
Geographic Segmentation
This type of segmentation scheme is most important to newspapers as well as broadcast radio and local television, where there are geographical boundaries to their coverage areas. But it has also been useful to other media in thinking about getting their messages out to certain regions of the country.
This is the oldest form of segmentation. A company would begin a business in a certain locale and produce products that the people in that locale wanted. Because of limits on distribution, that company would only do business in that one area. If that company wanted to expand, it would move out from its home locale to other places in the region where the product met a need. If there was a nationwide need, then the company could expand into national distribution, which many companies did; thus, geographic segmentation has become less useful.
Demographic Segmentation
Demographics focus on the relatively enduring characteristics about each person—such as gender, ethnic background, age cohort, income, and education. These are fairly stable characteristics and have been quite useful in classifying us into meaningful audience segments. Although people can change their status on some of these (such as education and income), such change requires a great deal of effort and takes a significant amount of time to evolve.
Similar to geographic segmentation, the usefulness of demographics as an audience segmentation device has been diminishing. Several generations ago, when adult women typically stayed home and raised children, it made sense to focus the marketing of household and childcare products on women only. But now that there are so many single-parent households and that the number of women in the workforce is about the same as men, gender has lost its value as a way of identifying a target market for most marketing campaigns.
Ethnicity also used to be a stronger demographic segmentation element than it is today, as the range of income, education, political views, and cultural needs is much greater within any ethnic group than it is across ethnic groups. With the tremendous growth of credit, household income has not been useful as a segmentation element. Educational level is also less useful. Seventy years ago, having a college degree put you in an elite—the top 5% of the population. But now, about two-thirds of people who graduate high school go on to college and about 32% of American adults over 25 years old have at least one college degree (Statistica, 2018a). While demographics are still valuable as a segmentation element for some products and some media messages, other segmentation schemes are required for most products and media messages.
Social Class Segmentation
The idea of social class is not the same thing as income level, although they are related. Income level is an economic variable that focuses attention on the amount of resources people have at their disposal, primarily indicated by the number of dollars in their household accounts for each year. In contrast, social class is a psychological variable that focuses attention on a worldview that people use as a lens through which people see themselves and others (DeAngelis, 2015). For example, people who have been socialized into a lower class mentality tend to believe that their lives are shaped by powerful social forces that they cannot control so it is important to link together with other people in groups in order to help one another. In contrast, people in higher social classes focus more on individual freedom and personal power because they believe they can exert greater control over their lives (Kraus, Piff, Meondoza-Denton, Rheinschmidt, & Keltner, 2012). Lower class people are more social because they depend more on other individuals through their personal relationships, while middle class people are more independent and insular because they rely more on their own abilities to create the lifestyles they want. Thus middle class people are more likely to believe that how they use their resources matters over the long run such that making sacrifices in the short term can pay off much bigger rewards in the long run.
Geodemographic Segmentation
A relatively recent innovation in consumer segmentation is geodemographics, which is a blend of geographic and demographic segmentation. It is based on the assumption that the same types of people tend to cluster together in neighborhoods. Therefore, neighborhoods tend to be homogeneous on important characteristics, and these characteristics are very different across neighborhoods.
One example of geodemographic segmentation is the PRIZM scheme, which was developed by the Claritas Corporation in 1974. PRIZM is based on a complex analysis of United States census data. It began with the 35,000 ZIP code neighborhoods and concluded that there were 40 different kinds of neighborhoods in the United States. It gave the clusters memorable (and trademarked) nicknames such as “sun belt singles” (which are southern suburban areas populated by young professionals), “Norma Rae-ville” (named after the movie featuring a working-class woman who unionized factory employees), “Marlboro country” (evoking a western rural area with rugged men on horses), “furs and station wagons” (typified by new money living in expensive new neighborhoods), and “hardscrabble” (which represents areas in the Ozark mountains, Dakota badlands, and south Texas border).
Psychographic Segmentation
Psychographics is the current cutting edge of segmentation schemes. It is not limited to one or two characteristics of people but uses a wide variety of variables to create its segments. Typically, a psychographic segmentation scheme will use demographics, lifestyle, and product usage variables in segmenting consumers. There are many examples of psychographic segmentation. Two stand out as being very influential because of the way they have been able to take a huge amount of information about the population and reduce it down into clear descriptions of a small number of types of people. Marketers use these types to select a niche audience that would be most likely to be interested in their products.
Twelve American Lifestyles
William Wells, director of advertising research at Needham, Harper & Steers in Chicago, developed the 12 American lifestyles that include Joe the factory worker and his wife Judy; Phyllis the career woman and her liberated husband Dale; and Thelma the contented homemaker and Harry the cigar-chomping middle-aged salesman. Each of these creations represents a different lifestyle. For example, Joe is a lower-middle-class male in his 30s who makes an hourly wage doing semiskilled work. He watches a lot of television, especially sports and action/adventure programs; he rarely reads. He drives a pickup truck and knows a lot about automotive parts and accessories. In contrast, Phyllis is a career woman in her 30s with a graduate degree. She reads a lot, and when she watches television, it is usually news or a good movie. She likes fine food, dining out, and travel.
VALS Typology
The VALS Typology was developed at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by Arnold Mitchell. After monitoring social, economic, and political trends during the 1960s and 1970s, Mitchell constructed an 85-page measurement instrument that asked questions ranging from people’s sexual habits to what brands of margarine they ate. He had 1,635 people fill out the questionnaire, and the answers became the database for his book, Nine American Lifestyles, published in 1980. In the book, Mitchell argued that people’s values strongly influence their spending patterns and media behaviors. So, if we know which value group a person identifies with, we can predict a great deal about the products and services they will want. For example, one of the groups is called the experientials. The people in this value grouping like to try new and different things to see what they are like. They like to travel. They are early users of new types of products. And they are constantly looking for something different.
The VALS typology has made SRI very successful, with an income of more than $200 million per year. By the mid-1980s, SRI had 130 VALS clients, including television networks; ad agencies; publishers such as Time; and corporations such as AT&T, Avon, Coke, General Motors, P&G, RJ Reynolds, and Tupperware. For example, Timex, a giant corporation best known for its watches, wanted to move into the home health care market with a selection of new products, including digital thermometers and blood pressure monitors. It decided to focus on two VALS segments: the societally conscious and the achievers. Everything about the packaging and the advertisements was chosen with these two groups in mind. Models were upscale and mature, in comfortable surroundings of plants and books. The tagline was “Technology where it does the most good.” Within months, all of Timex’s products were the leaders in this new and fast-growing industry.
Advertisers often target their ads to audiences with easy catchphrases and recognizable logos. Even when consumers are not looking for a new product, they’re more likely to pick specific brands when they’re constantly exposed to advertising for those brands.
Joe Robbins/Getty Images
Over the years, as the American culture has changed, VALS has changed its segments to keep up. Today, the VALS typology of segments looks very different than it did in the early 1980s. By keeping up with changes in people’s lifestyles over the years, VALS has remained a valuable tool to media programmers and marketers.
ATTRACTING AUDIENCES
Attracting audience attention is critical for the thousands of advertisers who spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year to expose their target audiences to their carefully designed messages. But as more and more advertisers as well as media outlets compete for the attention of the public, attention has grown to become the most valuable resource within the information economy. In their fascinating book, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Davenport and Beck (2001) argue, “In postindustrialized societies, attention has become a more valuable currency than the kind you store in bank accounts. . . . Understanding and managing attention is now the single most important determinant of business success” (p. 3).
After a media organization has selected a niche audience to target, it must develop content to attract people into that audience. The mass media employ two tactics to do this. First, they try to appeal to your existing needs and interests. Second, they use cross media and cross-vehicle promotion to attract your attention.
Appeal to Existing Needs and Interests
Media businesses no longer first develop vehicles and messages and then go looking for an audience; instead, they first conduct research to try to identify the message needs of potential audiences. Then they develop the content that they believe will attract people with those needs. For example, some people are very interested in sports, but other people are more interested in news and public affairs. These are two important niches for the media. Each of these has subniches. Some sports fanatics might enjoy baseball whereas others cannot stand baseball but love football.
How do media companies know what the existing needs are? The easiest way to answer this question is to look at what messages are already being consumed. The messages that already are attracting the most attention within a niche audience demonstrate that there is a particular existing need. The new competitors then try to create their own messages to attract that same audience by appealing to that demonstrated need. This is why many new films, television shows, and popular songs typically look and sound similar to last year’s most popular films, television shows, and songs. For example, in March of 2006, the cable television channel Bravo premiered The Real Housewives of Orange County. Its success resulted in spinoffs for The Real Housewives of New York City and The Real Housewives of Atlanta in 2008, The Real Housewives of New Jersey in 2009, The Real Housewives of D.C. and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in 2010, and The Real Housewives of Miami in 2011. Producers also developed international versions: The Real Housewives of Athens and The Real Housewives of Israel in 2011, The Real Housewives of Vancouver in 2012, The Real French Housewives of Hollywood in 2013, The Real Housewives of Melbourne in 2014, and The Real Housewives of Cheshire in 2015. Other cable television producers formulated their own shows featuring housewives (Mob Wives).
Programmers know that each person has a relatively narrow exposure repertoire—that is, a set of message types we attend to—so if the new competitors can make their messages very similar to what we are already attending to, we will likely pay attention to those new messages as well. Messages that are too different than what we are already exposing ourselves to will not break through the state of automaticity to capture our attention. We typically stay in this state of automaticity until something triggers our attention and then we pay attention to it. Therefore, media programmers look for what has triggered our attention in the past, and they construct their messages in a similar manner so that their messages will also trigger our attention.
Although we have a wide variety of media and messages available to us, we usually select a small subset that tend to serve our needs best. This fact about a small set of message preferences—or media repertoire—was clearly established several decades ago when there were far fewer media choices than we have today. Several decades ago, Ferguson (1992) found that even in households with more than 100 choices of channels, cable television viewers typically watched only five to eight channels and ignored the rest. Also, having a remote-control device to change television channels or a device to record shows was not found to increase the size of a person’s channel repertoire. Thus, when the media expand the number of messages offered, individuals do not increase the range of their exposures; instead, the expanded number of messages increases the number of niche audiences. With a larger range of messages available, individuals can find particular messages that better serve their needs; however, each person still has a relatively small number of favorite message types in their exposure repertoire.
Cross-Media and Cross-Vehicle Promotion
In order to attract new people to their message offerings, media programmers reach out to potential audience members who are most likely to want exposure to the messages and experiences they offer. Programmers do this with cross-media promotion and cross-vehicle promotion. For example, an entrepreneur creating a new digital gaming website about skateboarding will engage in cross-media promotion and place ads in other media, such as magazines and cable television shows focusing on skateboarding. This entrepreneur will also engage in cross-vehicle promotion by placing ads on other websites that offer information and experiences about skateboarding.
Many companies advertise their products heavily in sporting events as a way of targeting specific kinds of audiences.
AP Photo/Paul Sancya
Media programmers have become very focused on branding their particular vehicles and trying to build loyalty for those vehicles. For example, a local newspaper wants you to be loyal to that newspaper and get your news only there—not from websites, magazines, television, or the radio. But with the rise of media consolidation, media programmers have shifted their focus to the message and away from the vehicle. So, for example, a political commentator on the radio might also be asked to post a column on a website and appear on a television show also owned by the company. That company might also own a magazine and book publishing firm, in which case, the commentator would be encouraged to write a column for the magazine and publish a book. When this media conglomerate company brands its message—the commentator—the company then tries to market that message through all the media vehicles it owns so as to increase the number of revenue streams without adding much to the existing expenses. Therefore, media companies think of audiences more in terms of messages that would attract them rather than as groups of people limited to one medium or one vehicle.
Differences across media are also blurring over time. Newspapers have become more similar to magazines in their editorial outlook, featuring more soft news and human-interest pieces that are not time sensitive and that appeal more as entertainment than as information. Trade books are becoming shorter and less literary. Digital platforms with their games, encyclopedias, and websites are becoming more similar to films, books, magazines, and newspapers. Given the focus on messages and the convergence of channels, the content is becoming much more of a focus than is the delivery system.
Several decades ago, some futurists argued that we are moving toward convergence, where all the media will be one—“a single, high capacity, digital network of networks that will bridge what we now know as the separate domains of computing, telephony, broadcasting, motion pictures, and publishing” (Neuman, 1991, p. x). This convergence has been happening and continues to happen (Jenkins et al., 2013). The differences between channels of disseminating information have become much less important; in contrast, the differences in consumer needs across niche audiences has become much more important.
CONDITIONING AUDIENCES
Once a mass media organization has attracted you to a message, it immediately tries to condition you for repeated exposures. This drive toward audience conditioning is an essential strategy for all mass media. The costs of attracting members of an audience to their first exposure to a message are so high that media organizations must rely on repeated exposures in order to recoup their initial investment and eventually make a profit.
Media exposures are inertial. This means that when we are paying attention to a particular message, we tend to keep paying attention to that message, and when we are in an automatic state, we tend to stay in that state and filter out all the messages around us. For example, let’s say you go to YouTube and watch one of your favorite videos. YouTube will suggest additional videos you might want to view next. These suggestions are formulated based on your history of watching other videos. YouTube wants to hold onto you as a continuing audience member, so it keeps suggesting content you might like. Then, as you watch each suggested video and are entertained, you are being conditioned to want to return to YouTube tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. Successful websites—whether they deal with information, entertainment, music, video, or the printed word—all try to do the same thing. They offer apps that you can download and use for free on your mobile devices. They want to condition you to continually use their services so it becomes a habit that you cannot live without.
How much have the media conditioned you? And what is the pattern of that conditioning? To answer these questions, estimate how much time you spend with the various media during an average week. Because many media habits are governed by automatic routines, you may not be aware of the extent of your exposure, but that is okay at this point. Just estimate the best you can in Exercise 7.1.
When you have finished with your estimates in Exercise 7.1, look at the pattern across the different media. Which ones consume the most time? Which ones do you ignore? Think about why you apportion your time with the media as you do. Why do you ignore certain media altogether?
Now check to see how well your estimates of exposures to various media match your actual patterns of exposure by recording your actual exposures over the course of a week (see Exercise 7.2). I must warn you that this is an onerous task! Remembering to record all media exposures even for only one week takes continual mental effort. But this exercise should demonstrate how much effort you are saving when you follow your habits automatically and don’t have to think about them at all.
Compare what you think are your exposure habits (Exercise 7.1) and your actual exposure habits (Exercise 7.2). Do you see differences? Is your estimate of total weekly hours spent with the media the same as the actual amount of time you recorded in your diary? If your estimate is lower, then you can see that your habit is stronger than you previously thought; think about how the mass media have programmed you to expose yourself to a higher degree than you were aware. If your estimate is higher than your actual exposure, why do you think you overestimated your media habits? Now look for the difference between the estimates and the actual figures across different media. Where did you underestimate your exposures and why? Where did you overestimate your exposures and why?
The degree to which your estimates are accurate reflections of your actual exposure patterns is an indicator of how aware you are of your media habits. If you are highly aware, it is also likely that you are in control of those exposure patterns; that is, you have programmed your own mental codes so that when those codes run automatically, they are serving your goals. If, however, you have found large differences between your estimates and your actual exposure patterns, this is evidence that your codes have been programmed largely by others without your awareness. It is possible that you have been so thoroughly conditioned by past exposures to particular media or particular types of messages that you are now addicted. This concern is especially serious with internet sites that can micro-focus on your particular needs, give you the content and experiences you want continuously, and provide a long series of immediate reinforcements. Internet addiction has become a negative media effect that is growing, especially with content such as pornography, gaming, and shopping (Alter, 2017). For more on this negative effect, refer back to Chapter 4.
SUMMARY
This is an exciting time to be a part of our culture. The media are constantly working hard to identify our changing needs for information and entertainment. Once the media have identified a new need, they quickly design the kinds of messages that will attract people with that need; in this way, they construct audiences. Once a media company has attracted an audience, it works hard to condition that audience for repeat exposures, even to the point of addiction.
When we are well aware of our needs, we can use the mass media as an essential resource to satisfy the entire range of those needs. But if we are not self-aware, the most aggressive of the mass media will herd us into audiences that they continue to use to generate income from advertisers. You can gain more control over this process by becoming more media literate so that you can use the mass media as a tool in achieving your needs rather than allowing the mass media to use you as a tool to achieve their needs. After reading through this chapter, you should be more sensitized to your media exposures and you should be more aware of those exposures.
Further Reading
Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked. New York: Penguin Press. (354 pages, including endnotes and index)
The author, a New York University business school professor, shows how behavioral addiction follows the same patterns and has the same causes as chemical addiction. He focuses his arguments on the behavioral addiction to the internet, especially shopping, social contacts, pornography, and gambling. The first part of the book (three chapters) deals with the biology of addiction and how we have increased our understanding of behavioral addictions over the past few decades. Part 2 (six chapters) deals with how internet designers engineer addiction. In Part 3 (three chapters), the author provides some suggestions for helping people avoid addiction and for reducing it once it starts.
Davenport, T. H., & Beck, J. C. (2001). The attention economy: Understanding the new currency of business. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. (253 pages, including index)
This is a very readable book written by two business school professors who explain why attention deficit is such a serious problem in our economy. But they are not social critics who are interested in pointing out a problem and exploring recommendations for ameliorating the problem. Instead, they write more as marketing consultants who provide suggestions to businesses about how to attract the public’s attention.
Napoli, P. M. (2011). Audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of media audiences. New York: Columbia University Press. (272 pages total)
Written by a professor at Fordham University, this book shows how the conceptualization of audiences has changed over time, particularly with the development of the newer media technologies that serve to fragment society. The scholarly analysis of this phenomenon focuses on political, economic, and social perspectives.
Neuman, W. R. (1991). The future of the mass audience. New York: Cambridge University Press. (218 pages total)
Neuman begins with a good, balanced discussion of the difficult idea of postindustrialism and the conflict between fragmentation and homogenization. He argues that education contributes to fragmentation, with people able to peruse their specialized interests. Family has changed as women entered the workforce in large numbers. He also shows that media use has fragmented. He argues that this is not a new issue but is a continuing and central problem of political communications. The key issue is that of balance: balance between the center and the periphery, between different interest factions, between competing elites, and between an efficient and effective central authority and the conflicting demands of the broader electorate (p. 167). This is the conflict between community and pluralism.
Rowles, D. (2014). Mobile marketing: How mobile technology is revolutionizing marketing, communications, and advertising. Philadelphia: Kogan Page. (266 pages total)
This book begins with a good overview of recent changes in marketing and advertising and presents a good deal of practical information to help readers design their own campaigns to reach target markets.
EXERCISE 7.1
ESTIMATE YOUR MEDIA EXPOSURE
Try to estimate how many minutes and hours you spend with each of the following media during a typical week.
· ____ Watching video on demand (streaming to mobile devices, computers, and televisions so that you can start watching anytime you want)
· ____ Watching scheduled programs (cable television, broadcast television)
· ____ Watching films at a theater
· ____ Listening to radio (in your car, at home, while exercising, etc.)
· ____ Listening to downloaded music
· ____ Reading newspapers (both printed and online)
· ____ Reading magazines of all kinds (both printed and online)
· ____ Reading books (texts for class, novels for pleasure, etc.)
· ____ Surfing the internet looking for information and entertainment
· ____ Communicating with people through texting and email
· ____ Interacting with friends on social networking platforms
· ____ Creating media content to upload (photos to Facebook, videos to YouTube, etc.)
· ____ Playing games on electronic devices (computers, phones, consoles, etc.)
· ____ TOTAL
EXERCISE 7.2
TRACK YOUR MEDIA EXPOSURES
Keep a media exposure diary for one week. The diary can be a file on a mobile device or a piece of paper that you carry with you. Every time you are exposed to a message from the media either directly or indirectly, make an entry of the time and what the message was.
Direct exposures are those in which you come in contact with a medium and experience a message during that contact. Examples: Checked Facebook Monday 8 to 8:30AM. Emailed Monday 11AM to 12. Listened to talk radio in car Tuesday 1 to 1:30PM.
Indirect exposures are those in which you see a reminder of a media message, such as seeing a title of a movie on the marquee or at a bus stop. You don’t see the film itself (which would be a direct exposure), but you see something that reminds you of it. Also, listen to conversations. If people talk about something they heard from the media, then you have been exposed to that media message indirectly. For example, if you heard your friends talk about The Simpsons, then write, Talked with friends about The Simpsons Tuesday evening 7–8:30 PM.” If you happened to hear your roommate humming a popular song that is played often on the radio, then write, Roommate hummed [song title] Wednesday all day!
At the end of the week, analyze the entries in your diary to answer the following questions:
1. How much total time were you exposed to media messages?
2. How much total time did you spend creating media content (photos, videos, etc.)?
3. How much total time did you use the media for social interactions?
4. How much time did you spend in competitions or using media for games of all kinds?
5. What proportion of the exposures was direct and what proportion was indirect?
6. What proportion of media exposures were initiated by you (active) and what proportion just happened (passive)?
7. What kinds of experiences dominated your time with the media?
8. How do your diary data compare to your estimates from Exercise 7.1?
9. Now that you’ve conducted a careful inventory of your media usage, did you discover anything that surprised you?
EXERCISE 7.3
WHAT SEGMENTS ARE YOU IN?
1. Pick three of your favorite media exposures that present advertising messages; these can be television series on commercial television, magazines (print and online), websites, and so on. Write the name of each exposure experience (EE) on the column heading line below. Then as you engage in those EEs, notice the ads and record the product (or service) presented in each ad.
o EE 1: ___________ EE 2: ___________ EE 3: ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
o ___________ ___________ ___________
2. Now look at the lists of products and try to imagine who the advertisers had in mind as a target audience when they decided to advertise in each of those EEs.
· Are those products oriented more toward men or women? Does it matter?
· At what age group are the products aimed?
· At what economic level are the products aimed?
· At what educational level are the products aimed?
· At what geographical location are the products aimed?
· What values do the advertisers think you have?
3. Did you notice any ads for other EEs? For example, perhaps you were listening to music on your car radio and heard an ad for a newly released Hollywood movie.
If you did notice ads for other EEs, think about why the advertisers were trying to attract you. Are those advertised EEs brand-new to you? Or were those EEs things you already have been aware of?