Defining and measuring audiences
Audiences are vital participants in communication processes. They are the person, or people, with whom meaning is shared, whether that sharing process is intentional or unintentional, strategic or accidental, persuasive or controversial, wildly successful or a demonstrative failure. Without them, communication cannot be said to have taken place.
We’ve already seen that a good conversationalist will also be “a good listener” and think about their audience. This holds true for most, if not all, relationships between communicators and their audiences, in both synchronous and asynchronous situations. A face-to-face conversation is an example of synchronous, or real-time, communication. This allows us to be responsive to our listener and adjust our communication strategy in the moment.
Consider how this ability to connect with and respond to your listener changes when the conversation is mediated by a technological interface such as Zoom. Perhaps the Internet connection is poor, or the person prefers to keep their camera off, limiting your capacity to gauge their reactions.
Now consider how the ability to know one’s audience transforms again during asynchronous communication. Your audience is not present before you; they are elsewhere, and your capacity to know them – let alone adjust your message in response to their actions – is greatly diminished, or at least complicated. Asynchronous communication produces a gap between sender and receiver, and much professional communication practice today involves leaping or reaching across this gap. And the more information we can gather about our audience(s), the better we will be able to make this leap.
Imagining one’s audience is therefore a crucial component of successful communication. Defining “audience” in his Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts, John Hartley writes that the concept is a means by which “an unknowable group can be imagined” (2004: 11). Hartley also points out that identifying an audience often means homogenising it. Whenever we imagine a target audience, we are in danger of ignoring the differences within that group.
But skilled communicators today need to address and understand diverse audiences. For example, a creator of online content needs to consider whether their messages meet the needs of audiences with physical, sensory, or intellectual disabilities, and whether their language is inclusive and respectful of diverse cultural groups. In a different context, the writers of a Netflix series need to consider diverse audiences but also the diverse ways their program will be watched: piecemeal or binged; sporadic or committed; at home or while commuting; as soon as the program drops or many months later.
Audience research and measurement tools
A range of tools can be used by communicators to measure and track audience behaviour. Some of these measurement tools have been used for decades, and these exist alongside emerging tools – indeed, there are more ways than ever before to measure what audiences do when they interact with communication content.
Let’s take the example of a documentary filmmaker trying to measure how audiences have responded to their latest film. They may look at box office figures – the revenue generated from ticket sales at cinemas – which have traditionally been used as a measurement of the popularity or success of a film. Test screenings with focus groups may help the filmmaker understand the appeal of their film and can be especially useful for marketing purposes. If the film is distributed online, digital measurement tools can be used to gather a range of information about the number of times it is viewed, the amount of time viewers have spent watching it, where people are accessing the video from and where those people go after watching it. The filmmaker might receive feedback in the form of ratings, reviews, comments, likes, and shares. Eye-tracking can provide specific information about where audience attention is placed when they watch the film. And a sentiment analysis can provide the filmmaker within information about how audiences are feeling about the film and whether its reception has been positive or negative.
Professional communicators are not the only ones with skin in the game when it comes to understanding audiences. Researchers in academic contexts have long studied audiences as a means of better understanding communication processes, products, and effects. Interviews, focus groups, and surveys are all research methods that can deliver insights into the behaviours, practices, and attitudes of audiences. Reception analysis is the study of how audiences respond to and interpret media texts. Netnography is the study of online communities, while autoethnography is the study of one’s own position and experiences within culture. Each of these methods has value in the context of audience studies. And each has its limits. But importantly, when we engage in audience research using one or a combination of these methods and approaches, we avoid making assumptions about who audiences are and what they do with communication content. Instead, we uncover evidence that can be used to support our claims.
Reach and attention
Earlier, I used the analogy of reaching across the gap between sender and receiver to describe the process of imagining one’s audience. Fittingly, the term audience reach has been used for decades to refer to the number of people (or households) exposed to a message. OzTAM, Australia’s television audience measurement body, defines “reach” as the number of unique viewers who have seen at least one minute of a program.
In a broader digital media context, the term “reach” is typically used to identify the percentage of a target audience who sees (or hears) a message. For example, the Australian government recently stated that distributing content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok would allow Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, to improve “reach” with younger viewers.
Facebook, meanwhile, defines reach as “the number of people who saw any content from your Page or about your Page”, with the disclaimer “This metric is estimated”. In digital marketing, “reach” refers to how many unique users are exposed to online content, while the term “impressions” refers to how many times a piece of online content has been viewed, including multiple views by the same user. Reach and impressions are metrics that measure audience size and content visibility, but not the level or quality of interaction between audiences and content.
Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash
Audience attention has always been commodified in this way. Even the media industries with the longest histories – radio, cinema, television, newspapers – fought for audience attention, which was monetised, tracked, and sold to advertisers.
But today, it is sometimes claimed that we live in an attention economy, in which attention itself is a scarce and valuable commodity. Digital culture affords an abundance of information and content, but people have a limited amount of attention – so communicators and content creators compete for our attention, which is bought and sold in transactions between media industries, content creators, and advertisers. Philip Napoli (2011: 6) points out that a key feature of the attention economy is the emphasis on maximising exposure and increasing reach: in an attention economy, the primary concern for a communicator is how many people have been exposed to the message.
Attention in a fragmented media world
Think about how you, as a media consumer, distribute the valuable currency of your attention. It may be that your attention is fragmented across multiple types of communication content. Perhaps this results in distraction and a dilution of your concentration – or perhaps not. Regardless, it’s likely that your choices are not the same as those of your partner, your work colleagues, your friends, even those of similar age or with whom you share cultural tastes and preferences. Your choices about how you spend the currency of your attention are your own.
Just as our attention may be fragmented across different texts and platforms, we ourselves belong to a fragmented rather than a mass audience. The term fragmentation refers to the proliferation of media, which has led to more choice for media consumers (platforms, content, devices, channels) and the erosion of the so-called mass audience. Today, audiences are “distributed over many different channels in no fixed pattern”, as Denis McQuail points out in his book Audience Analysis (1997: 138), and content consumption has become more personalised.
In such an environment where attention is limited and audiences are distributed across platforms, outlets, devices, and content choices, communicators somehow need to achieve not just visibility but engagement. The collection and analysis of audience data responds to some of these problems by allowing for a personalised approach to communication. In 2015, Shoshana Zuboff coined the term “surveillance capitalism” to refer to the process by which our online behaviours are turned into data that is commodified, captured, and sold. Napoli writes that audiences have always been socially constructed by media industries, advertisers, measurement firms, and regulators (2011: 3). It would appear that today’s audiences are also constructed by big data.
Ahead in Chapter 3…
