AQA GCSE Media Studies Student Book

89 • The 1939 film Gone With the Wind made $1.64 billion (adjusted to today’s values) and holds the record for box office takings. • The Daily Mirror sold five million copies a day at its peak in the mid-1960s. • Until its closure, the News of the World was Britain’s best-selling newspaper. At its peak in 1951 it sold 8.4 million copies a week, equal to one issue for every six people in the population. You must be careful, though, not to overestimate the decline of traditional media. The biggest ever television audience in the USA was as recent as 2015: the 49th Super Bowl final (114 million). The audience for more recent finals has declined only very slightly. Gone with theWind has the highest box office ever. Advertising slots in the live TV transmission of the 2016 Super Bowl were a record $5 million per 30-second advert. See the carp fishing magazines on page 38. Link Niche audience A niche audience is smaller and more specialised than a mass audience. To target a niche audience or market, then, is to attempt to design a product that is perfectly suited to a particular group of people. Key term Where would you advertise an expensive supercar? Quick question 3.1 Categorising the audience Media producers like nothing more than creating really big audiences: the bigger the better. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. The more people who buy a magazine or pay to watch a film, the more money they have coming in. Alternatively, if a really big audience can be created for a product – a show screened on ITV, for example – a very high fee can be charged to advertisers. However, size isn’t everything. As already seen, the really mega audiences for media products are mostly in the past and are unlikely to return. Also, the financial risks to media producers are very high if they gamble a huge investment on a product in the hope of creating a huge audience. Rather than trying to create products that are ‘all things to all people’, media industries put a lot of time and effort into the careful targeting of specific audiences. A small or niche audience can be successfully targeted with the right genre product, as seen in Chapter 1 with the carp fishing magazines. At the other end of the spectrum, even multimillion dollar blockbuster films are designed to meet the needs of particular sections of the market for films as a whole. Advertisers, too, need to ensure that their marketing messages reach exactly those people who are potential purchasers. There is no point in showing advertisements for £100,000 supercars to those who cannot possibly afford them. 3 Media Audiences