What it’s about

How many times have you seen a course or seminar outline that reads: “Define your concept, then target your audience. Then you do your budget.” Have you noticed that after “target the audience” there is always a full stop (.) and nothing else?

No one seems to want to tell you how to target your audience. What’s more, no one seems to see how it is all part of a bigger picture.

Targeting the audience is all about:

	Making sure that the content is made with a consistent goal in mind: that everyone on the large team knows, acknowledges and works towards the same goal.
	Making sure that the broadcaster and the producer know exactly where they are going, and what they want to achieve.
	What the audience is worth, in numbers, money and audience quality.
	Calculating what budget to allocate to the content.
	Identifying potential for versioning and repurposing so that they are part of the business plan right from the start.
	Designing the Positioning and Branding.
	Aligning the content branding to the station branding.
	Making a start on the business plan.
	Identifying commercial potential in terms of ancillaries like merchandising and product placement.
	Designing the framework for the marketing plan.
	Targeting potential co-production partners.
	Designing a Prospectus for investors and funders.

Audience Analysis is the kingpin of the big picture. You start by analysing your audience, and within no time, you find that you have solved most of the problems involved in getting to all the other results.

If you draw the plans and build the foundations properly, then the rest of the house is easy to construct.

So how do you analyse your audience?

The people with decades of experience do it naturally without quite realising what they are doing. But it takes thirty years and many, many expensive mistakes, to get there.

People with fewer years experience normally use the two factors that are close at hand:

	They look at similar genres, formats and styles in past broadcasting history and use past ratings, the list of advertisers and the past profits or losses to make a judgement.
	They look for what seems to be a suitable slot and then set minimum targets in terms of ratings, and hope for the best

But it’s more scientific, methodical and easier than that

It’s all a matter of understanding the psychology of all audiences, and the culture of segmented audiences.

The two methods used, as described above, are called:

	Demographics
	Pattern History

There are a number of other dimensions that are absolutely essential:

	Psychographics
	Segmentation
	Ethnographics
	Geographics
	Culture

In entertainment, it does not matter how many people there are out there, it only matters how many of them will feel the right way about the programme.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.”

In the same way:

“You can give someone a TV set, switch it on for him, but you can’t make him watch it.”

So how do you find out how many people will watch the programme and how do you do so even before the script is written?

It’s not easy, but it’s very, very possible. Experienced broadcasters and producers do it every moment of their waking days.

What are psychographics?

These are not just a matter of Life Stages, Life Styles and SocioMonitor. It’s much more. It’s a matter of creatively processing the information you glean from these generalisations, and envisioning a mass of people, envisioning what the programme will look like, and almost "shamanistically" imagining you are in the room with a family and watching them view the programme from inside their own minds.

Psychographics are the results of:

	Knowing how people react to entertainment before culture comes into the picture.
	Segmenting them after culture is taken into account.

This means that psychographics are the process of going through what you know about:

	The psychology of entertainment, and
	Culture

You are then in a position to target your concept to anyone from:

	A small niche segment of an audience, to
	A mass audience across many cultures, countries and markets.

What’s the difference between them?

The psychology of entertainment is derived from the meeting of Consumer Behaviour, and the emotional needs of people.

Consumer Behaviour is well-researched all over the world, including South Africa. We have to take what we need from it for the purposes of television, and then synthesise this with basic Needs Theory, whether we are using Maslow or McGuire.

On the other hand, culture involves all the segmentation studies that have been done, of which SocioMonitor is just one. We also cross check our conclusions against a wide range of qualitative measures.

Don’t we do this already?

Absolutely NOT! Professionals are not using psychographics systematically or creatively. Simply because they do not understand them properly, and they don’t see how they fit into the BIG PICTURE.

Let’s have a look at the big picture in graphic form. It looks like a wheel:



That’s where these training courses come in.

	It does not give you a mathematical system to calculate the audience’s feelings. That’s just not possible. If it were, you could buy the software at Incredible Connection.
	It gives you a systematic path through which you guide your creativity.
	It helps to keep a creative focus.
	It helps you divorce your conclusions from what you yourself feel.
	It helps you put your mind into the mind of the audience.
	It targets your energies and productivity to only one end – making sure that the concept, on the one side, and the audience, on the other side, meet in harmony.
	It gives the Big Picture. It is based on comprehension and understanding.

Who needs these courses?

Producers, writers, directors, commissioning editors, production managers, distributors in video, film, broadcast TV, multimedia production, web design, radio, music, theatre and live events.