Saturday 15 October 2011

The Audience Factor

Five centuries ago, William Shakespeare declared that the ‘all the world’s a stage.’  Over the centuries the stage has become bigger, wider, sophisticated so much so that it is not about an individual playing his individual role, but it is about corporate, brands and governments enacting their roles in front of a global audience.
In literal terms, an audience is described as a group of people who participate in an event of any kind. The classification of audience can be based on a number of factors like gender, age, race, religion and so on.  The data about audience is broadly used for understanding the consumer patterns of a given population; it also provides valuable insight about the preferences, attitudes and behaviour of a given culture. For example, an audience for a football match is much higher in Europe than in Asia, which indicates that most people in Asia prefer other sports over football.
For media, PR and communication, audience form the very basis of marketing.  Whilst audience can be more specific where it comes to a concert, television show or a theatre; the universality of the internet and social media communication tools has meant that the audience for a particular message or advertisement can be potentially global. Moreover, audiences today are not just receptors of a message; they in fact influence or even participate in the creation of messages. In other words, brands and businesses increasing use communication tools to talk about things that they perceive that their audience want to hear about.

 

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