Demographics & Institutions

Demographic information is used in media marketing to classify an audience into age, gender, race and other categories.

In media, as in all business, demographics are used to pinpoint potential audience growth and to spot underperformance. All forms of media are targeted to certain audiences. For example, Cosmopolitan, Woman's Day and Better Homes & Gardens are magazines that reach the female demographic. But beyond that, they target different types of women.

Media companies constantly tweak their products and the way they are advertised to hit a certain demographic group. The publisher of one of the women's magazines who follows demographic trends may decide her audience is becoming too old to attract the top advertisers. So she will focus on putting younger people on the cover and writing articles for a younger female customer to change the magazine's demographic makeup.

In the magazine world, general interest publications that were designed to appeal to people of all ages and both genders sometimes struggle by trying to attract such a broad audience. Life and Look magazines are two examples. Demographic information doesn't just matter in the magazine industry. Television shows, radio stations, newspapers and websites are also produced to appeal to certain groups of people.

National Readership Survey (NRS) demographic categories

Social Grade	Social Status	Occupation
A	upper middle class	higher managerial, administrative or professional
B	middle class	intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1	lower middle class	supervisory or clerical, junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2	skilled working class	skilled manual workers
D	working class	semi and unskilled manual workers
E	those at lowest level of subsistence	state pensioners or widows (no other earner), casual or lowest grade workers

On YouTube's data statistics it says that by far, 20-to-35-year-old bloggers are the most enthusiastic about embedding and linking to videos (57.3%). Teenage bloggers (13-19) and those in the 36-to-60-year demographic group embed and link to around 20% each. Those over 60 account for just 1.4%.

When looking at the top categories for each age group, we discovered that older bloggers have a higher interest in the News and Politics category. This category is the least favorite among younger bloggers with less than 5% of total links.

Looking at video tags, Michael Jackson and the cast of the movie The Twilight Saga: New Moon are the most popular names used in tags among teenage bloggers. Older bloggers showed more interest in using tags from the political domain with Barack Obama and other political figures taking the top spots. The table below shows the top names in video tags based on various age groups, implicitly revealing interest trends for individuals and video themes.

Institution Profile

A media conglomerate, media group or media institution is a company that owns large numbers of  companies in various mass media such as television, radio, publishing, movies, and the internet. "Media conglomerates strive for policies that facilitate their control of the markets around the world".

Institutions are the area of media which concern themselves with broadcasting, which channels to broadcast on, radio stations and what artists feature on certain stations in order to create an audience profile. 

Target Audiences

NME is a very popular Indie/Indie Rock magazine and so I believe that their reader profile will be very similar, if not the same, as the reader profile I would be targeting with my music video and ancillary texts.