Component One Section B Advertising - Audiences

Component One Section B

Component One Section B is just audience. This can be advertising, newspaper industries, video games, radio, and film.

The question will be focused on audience and will be up to a maximum of 20 marks.

"Explore how advertisements target their audiences"

In terms of advertisement, this will only be applicable to Tide and Water Aid

For 20 Marks, talk about both.

Kiss Of The Vampire will not be in Component One Section B

Knee Jerk Reaction - How do Tide and Wateraid target audiences?

Tide - Makes the audience feel left out, and behind on the times if they don't purchase Tide. This is done through visuals and media language

Wateraid - Targets audience through guilt toward not savouring the rain we get in first world countries (Specifically U.K.). Point of charity adverts is to appeal to people's inner insecurities that they aren't helping out enough. 

Both Tide and Water Aid advertisement are encoded with ideologies and meaning that, through media language and technical elements, target a specific target audience.

Plan - 

Tide: 

Lexis

Consumerist Ideology

Representation

Gender Binary

Mode Of Address

Water Aid:

Juxtaposition

Mise-En-Scene

Music - Intertextuality 

Anchorage

Theorists:

Bell Hooks

Paul Gilroy

Stuart Hall

George Gerbner

Genre Iconography

Codes / Conventions / Paradigms

Ideologies

Dominant Ideologies

Dominant / Preferred reading

Uses and gratifications

Technical codes

Hegemony

Sociohistorical Context

Charity Advertising

Definition

Audiences - 

Audiences give media a purpose, as they are a specific group of people that media products that can be targeted to. Audiences are important to every industry, and all of the industries rely on them. In terms of advertisement, one of the main goals is to sell the product and a lifestyle to a specialised audience, and this will fail without an audience to begin with. 

Audiences are an essential aspect of media that, without which, it could not exist. This is particularly evident in advertising whereby it is imperative that producers target specialised audiences.

Argument

The audiences are targeted by advertising producers through a variety of technical elements and constructed media language that connotes a clear dominant ideology and a preferred reading in order for them to buy the product.

Context

Water Aid advert was produced in 2016, Water Aid was established in 1981 by the U.N. Atomic London were the producers of the video. Tide, owned by Procter and Gamble, a multinational conglomerate, produced this advert in the 1950's, advertising the Tide brand, a market leader at the time.

Intro Paragraph:

Audiences give media a purpose, as they are a specific group of people that media products that can be targeted to. Audiences are important to every industry, and all of the industries rely on them. In terms of advertisement, one of the main goals is to sell the product and a lifestyle to a specialised audience, and this will fail without an audience to begin with. Producers of advertisements target audiences by encoding specific ideologies through the use of media language and technical codes, they include a dominant ideology and a preferred reading which they want the audience to relate to in order to sell products and make a product. The Water Aid audio-visual charity advert was produced in 2016, and Water Aid was established in 1981 by the U.N. Atomic London were the producers of the video. Tide, owned by Procter and Gamble, a multinational conglomerate, produced this advert in the 1950's, advertising the Tide brand, established in 1946, which was a market leader at the time.

Tide Media Language & Target Audiences:

Housewives are the target audience for the Tide advertisement.

The audience are supposed to relate to the target audience. If they align with the preferred reading and feel represented, they are more likely to buy the product.

Uses and Gratification Theory - Blumler and Katz. People like to be personally identified, aspirational content.

Direct mode of address - Tide's got what women want!

Tide is superlative, cleanest, best, better than competitors. The lexis creates the dominant ideology.

Whitest, Cleanest, Brightest. "Actually brightens clothes." Emotive and superlative language

Women is hugging Tide because she loves it. Personifies it as her affection for Tide. 

"Truly Safe", "Its A Miracle" Reassuring, preferred reading that sells the lifestyle and ideology.

The young women featured in the adverts represent the 1950's Post War Nuclear Family. Men and Children's code on the washing line.

Endorsement from Good Housekeeping Magazine, Opinion Leader for the target audience.

Preferred reading (Stuart Hall) of the advert's reassuring lexis is that, despite being a "new product" Tide provides solutions to the audience's domestic chores / needs.

Advertising developed significantly during the 1950s and this theory, developed by Gerbner in the early 1970s, explains some of the ways in which audiences may be influenced by media texts such as adverts.

Reinforces the consumerist ideology. This has been cultivated.

The Tide advert aims to cultivate the ideas that: This is the brand leader, nothing else washes to the same standard as Tide, its desirable, and its "miracle suds" are an innovation for the domestic washing market. Gerbner argues that as the repetition of these key words continues to align the viewers ideology to that of the dominant ideology.

Water Aid Media Language & Target Audiences:

Conventional charity advertising is black and white, dreary, skeletal kids with rickets and kwashiorkor, dark and gloomy. "Sunshine on a rainy day" is bright, positive, cheerful, and shows the impact of the investment into Water Aid and shows that your money does actually make a difference. This is also part of the mission statement of Atomic London. 

Binary Opposition of the wet and pessimistic rainy England, in comparison to the desolated wasteland and dead crops of Africa. This could be to guilt trip the audience by showing how we take the natural rain and water for advantage. This once again shows personal identity. British audience is targeted specifically because of how relatable the shot it.

Claudia is the 'poster-girl' for the advert as she is fairly young, and she is singing, this could be to provide emphasis on the chorus later. Personalised narrative, we can relate to Claudia by herself, but seeing it with a personal viewpoint makes it more relatable. 

The likely audience demographic is constructed through the advert's use of a young woman with whom they might personally identify. Parents might make similar readings, identifying empathetically with the better and privileged life that they live. Water Aid acts an an Opinion Leader for the target audience who would assume the "650 Million people without water" is a real and large statistic, and would want to help out.

The handheld camera and indirect mode of address made by Claudia connote that the audience is following her story, but Water Aid rather than she herself has constructed this narrative.

Cultivation - This theory might suggest that audiences have become used to the contentions of this sub=genre of advertising and perhaps somewhat 'immune' to pleading, earnest non-digetic voiceovers by well known voices and black and white slow motion emotive representations of people suffering

The target audience's likely liberal political perspectives will have been shaped by exposure to previous, generically similar adverts, shaping their worldview that the suffering of people less fortunate than themselves can be alleviated by charitable donations.

PEA Paragraph

The Tide advertisement targets audiences through direct mode of address which has been encoded within the advertisement in order to best appeal to and target the audience. One of the largest segments of the Tide poster is a large banner reading "Tide's Got What Women Want!" in bold, red letters, with a sans serif font. This mode of address is key for targeting an audience as it plays on the audience's need to fit in and follow popular choice, and inadvertently adhering to the dominant ideology.  This is directly linked to the consumerist boom of the 1950's, and it shows how women are being coerced through hegemony to buy products that will improve their lifestyle and role as a domestic servant, portraying commodity fetishism. It could also be argued that George Gerbner's theory of Cultivation applies here, as the direct mode of address (which is seen constantly throughout the entire advert) and the repetition and rate at which it appears, will easily align the audience's viewpoint with the preferred reading - showing a successful targeting of the audience. 

The Water Aid audiovisual advertisement also targets audience through use of Blumler and Katz's Uses and Gratifications theory. One key way to target audiences is to relate to them on a personal level, and this is done through the initial shot of the advert. It features a gloomy indoor scene in presumably Britain, with a rainy mise-en-scene and a pessimistic radio broadcast talking about another rainy day. This is relatable for the target audience, and it targets them through the relatable nature of the scene.