Audience: Demographics & social class

Notes from today's lesson on Audience

Demographic classification:

• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Social class
• Race/ethnicity
• Job/profession/earnings
• Home (city/village/countryside)

Social class classification

Advertisers have traditionally classified people into the following groups:

• AB – Managerial and professional 
• C1 – Supervisory and clerical 
• C2 – Skilled manual 
• DE – Unskilled manual and unemployed

Audience profiles

Advertisers these days are interested in more than just a social class classification. Now they try to sell a brand or lifestyle.

So you also need to think about the kind of brands your audience will be interested in.

Armani and Porsche? Banana Republic and Apple? John Lewis and The Times? Nike and PlayStation? Peppa Pig and Haribo?

Audience profile task

Create an audience profile for a magazine of your choice using Photoshop.

First, use demographics: Age, gender, education, social class, race/ethnicity, job/profession/ earnings, home (city/village/countryside).

Then write some statements that your target audience agree with. Look at the NME example for inspiration. Statements such as 'It's important to look good' or 'Enjoy life and don't worry about the future' work well for this part of the profile.

Then use brand logos that the audience will use or enjoy and build them into your profile.

NME magazine example:

Make sure you save your audience profile in your folder on the Media Shared drive - we will be adding to it in future lessons as we learn more about audience!