media ratings and target marketing

media ratings and target marketing all have to do with the audience member/ consumer. the consumer holds the power in what a company sells, and what a network shows.

therefore the consumers attention is very valuable to companies.

The idea of when you are a audience member is a frequent question in media studies, however since the age of the passive audience member its safe to say we are always being subjected to content, ads, campaigns etc.

this has changed the consumers behaviours, for example commercials we dont have time for, so whats the solution? fast forward and skip them. Now the advertisers need to work harder to find a way to market to us, without it seeming like they are.

 how do they do this....

easy they find out your browser history and advertise to you that way, or make you sit through a 30 second clip before your youtube clip, even better make you watch an ad before you play your game so its free. this is a silent contract we as the consumer are signing to markerters we understand that they want our information to make money, and we want to use their resources ( facebook, candy crush etc.)

Again audiences are hard to describe, but to marketers its essential, companies break down consumers into categories so they know what to market and sell to you specifically.  they do this by target marketing through age, gender, race, geography and so much more.

in seminar we discussed specifically how wal mart is able to track your every sale and knows what you want, as their target marketing.

we also talked about the idea of veiwablity, again how and when are you a audience member, if i have a show on but am in the kitchen doing the dishes, am i a audience member for the show? this is challenge companies face when trying to count their show ratings. although a couple of options are available such as a survey, a box connected to your tv, and a pager size adapter to tell marketers what they want to know.

while the reading discusses how the united states is estimated to spend 60 billion in digital ad spending, the age of advertising on television is disappearing, due to PVR, netflix etc.
the new way is to display at least 50% of pixels for one second to th consumer, as an effective way to get the consumers attention.
I believe this can be achieved because we are so use to skimming things, driving by things fast and not stopping to smell the roses, we are living in a time in need of fast pace marketing.

overall target marketing is the most essential to marketers when trying to figure out their marketing strategies and product development, our views and attention will always be worth something.

Public opinion

lets start with an understanding

of what a public opinion is, public opinion refers to ' group consensus about what matters of public concern which has developed in the wake of informed discussion.

and lets distinguish the difference between an opinion being that its your thoughts/feelings
while knowledge is based on something that can be proven.

in our society public opinion serves as a primary means of communication from the citizens to their government, ( as seen in elections ).

like everything else with media, there is never a distinguish answer of whom were discussing. the question of "who" is a member of the public is always changing depending upon historical context ( historical movements gave audiences the ability to gain legitimacy) and the agendas of those measuring public opinion.

As we talked in class a major theory which explains this is Agenda Setting, Agenda setting theory describes the powerful influence of the media - the ability to tell us what issues are important.
in lecture we were able to watch clips of older news clips which have the ability to shift an audiences view. This lead to the discussion of news priorities, which asked whats most important in the news story. Today the most important news would be the Blue jays score update and the Canadian elections.

when discussing public opinion politics comes up often, when elections are getting close, its common for political parties to release videos displaying other party leaders in a negative light, in hopes that their video will alter your opinion on this party/ party leader and therefore not vote for them in the upcoming election.


This video clip example of a political party talking negatively about other parties and highly of themselves leads into the article: If theres a news agenda. This article discusses the differences between news that is presented to you in the style of hard news ( regular news broadcast) and the alternative "funny news" such as comedians like John Oliver on late night shows discussing the same issues as were discussed in the news that day. the theory is that because the news is presented to the audience in a comedic way and not so heavy not only will more people watch it, for its considered entertaining rather than educational, but the comedians perspective however right or wrong is simply a slip of the issue, or not the whole story. If it was the whole story it would translate into hard news, therefore funny news is a way for the public to gain an opinion on political issues as an example, but its not always the most accurate or informative.

in seminar we focused on how the media's agenda setting easily alters celebrity appearances because they are talked about so often by such an array of perspectives, while not being able to actually ever meet the people that are being discussed the publics opinion is suggested to change often.

we also discussed the idea of audiences becoming more active, there being mediated communication and the fourth wall, as well as asked if audiences should be interactive. in my opinion yes i believe audiences should be able to participate in the discussion whether it be electing a new political representative, voting for your favorite television star, or simply voting on what the schools cafeteria menu should posses. everyone should be able to voice what they think.

finally as always the question comes up about HOW we measure such things. however when it comes to public opinion it isnt so vague and questionable, measuring public opinion is done in a variety of ways such as surveys, face to face, straw polls, random sampling, census etc. although some such as straw polls arent a very accurate representation of an entire population, it is a way to capture the publics views in the best ways we know so far.

Effects of media messages

The topic, "effects of media messages" is essential to the study of audiences because audiences are exposed to such a variety of different media formats everyday such as: print media, television, movies, video games, music, cellphones, various kinds of software and of course the internet.

because such a variety of media formats are readily available for audiences to consume its important to remember to use a broad perspective on media effects in order to understand the incredibly wide range of influence the media messages carry.



Personally when I hear the phrase media affects my mind goes towards the negative impacts media has on us, such as watching violent TV causes aggression in youths, or how hearing a radio broadcast can cause direct effects on its listeners, or how medias unrealistic image of the female body creates young females to become self conscious and anorexic trying to meet media standards.

However true these statements can be showing negative affects of media messages

Lecture example of "Social Learning Theory" created by Albert Bandar exploring how children are socialized by their environment. An experiment took place where some children were made to watch as an adult as he betted a plastic Bobo doll, while others weren't exposed to this. Then all of the children were individually put into the same room were they found themselves to with the Bobo doll.  The results showed that the children whom had watched the adult be aggressive towards the doll, displayed similar characteristics, while the ones who did not witness the violent acts were not violent themselves. Thus the plastic Bobo experiment displays an example of negative effects of the media.


Textbook example of the "War of The Worlds Broadcast" of 1938 a time when listeners ate, slept and dreamt about what the radio told them to. During this particular broadcast, actors were given the famous script of the novel, "War of The Worlds" while enhancing the broadcast with realistic background sounds which would have been described in the book. The broadcast intention was to be a source of entertainment for its listeners however the broadcast ended up leaving listeners leaving their homes with  their families believing the world itself was being taken  over by aliens. This shows the direct effects media messages can have.

There are also examples of positive media affects as shown in audiences were "The Ice Bucket Challenge" a challenge encouraging audiences to pour cold water on themselves to display for a brief second what it feels like to have mls, each video was promoted to donate to mls funds to find a cure. This is a positive example of effects of media messages because it promotes good behaviour, for a good cause.

In seminar this week we discussed how hard it is to study audiences effects of media due to a variety of reasons: inadequate technology, miss representation, active vs passive audience etc. which lead us to discuss the many hardships in actually trying to study audiences and how studying audiences have changed over the years. this topic was backed up by the article we were suppose to read for class, "Taking audience research into the age of new media: old problems and new challenges" this article discusses how in the past audiences were mainly reported by ethnographic studies. the main example was the example of the study of romance novels, and how it was previously assumed that middle aged women simply read the medium to pass time, however due to a change in how we study audiences from a passive stereotype to a active member allowed for research to conclude that women read romance novels for many reasons, for submission of the male characters, to enhance their love life's, etc. not to simply pass the time.

an end thought, audiences are always changing, we as the audience are finding new ways to consume media and participate in the media we choose, therefore as we change the technology and research to study us will have to change organically as well.