1. Understanding how media producers define audiences for their product
Contextual Studies - Assignment 2
Part 1
Audiences

2. Types of Research Qualitative Research Quantitative Research
Audience Classification

3. What is Qualitative Research
Qualitative research is when you give your opinion on something. These cannot be oppressed in numbers, but words unlike quantitative. Your attitudes and concerns are all part of qualitative research. Unlike Quantitative, qualitative can be very descriptive. It would contain:
An opinion
Someone’s views
A review on a film
Qualitative data can be collected through questionnaires

4. Quantitative Research
Quantitative research is all statistic and numerical. It focuses on things like the number of votes, views of a show, etc. These results can be shown or displayed on graphs, charts and tables unlike qualitative data. Types of quantitative research:
Number of show views
Money used to make a film or made back
The amount of votes
Time spent on something

5. Audience Classification
Research is needed for all productions. Audience awareness needs to be known. The director, producer, scriptwriter and even actors all need to be aware of who they are trying to entertain or inform. They will all know roughly what rating they want for the production but it doesn’t always turn out the way they want it. If you are making a new product you would need to know who you’re consumers/audience are or might be. You also need to know if there is a big demand on the product and if there are any competitors. (Is there a market for it)
When defining an audience, factors that must be considered include: Age, Gender, Race and Sexuality Education Occupation Annual Income Disposable Income Current Lifestyle/ Aspirational or Desired Lifestyle Culture Media Interests Buying Habits Loyalty to Brands

6. Our Product/topic

7. The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead is an American post apocalyptic horror series. It is based on the ongoing comic books and is braodcasted by AMC. The show has brought them far. The story is based around a group of survivers who are trying to survive the aftermath. The show mainly focuses on the survival of humanity and the fight with the oncoming undead.

8. Audience Classification for The Walking Dead
The production team know what they want to make and have done that. They target a niche audience that are most into the product, but they do go outside that niche audience to try and please others.
There are two ways in which audience classification can be proved and checked.
These are with Qualitative and Quantatiave Research

9. Demographics - Audience
Here is an example of one of The Walking Dead demographics on Internet Movie Database.

10. Audience Classification
From the research provided. We think that the social group would range from Group C – F
This is definitely a show that students and young adults are into
The age range of viewers are 18 – 49
The show has broken the record for viewers in this category

11. Qualitative Research for The Walking dead
The main way for me to find qualitative data on this show was by looking for reviews and questionnaires that are for the show.
I went to several sited to find reviews. I used IMDB, Mashable, HollywodTV, ScreenRant and MetaCritic.
They all had critic reviews and audience reviews which is exactly what I needed.

13. They also have their own Facebook page and fan pages.
On their page they post daily questionnaires about the latest episodes so they can get their own feedback.
Here is a poll that the official page did. They do these to interact with their fans more. This pole was about voting for episode 13 in season 3 and as you can see under, people have said why they voted and/or why they didn’t vote for that episode.

14. Quantitative Research for The Walking Dead
The quantitative data that I was looking for was mainly viewing figures for the show.
The sites used for this research were Mashable, GetGlue, NielsonMedia, TvByTheNumbers and BARB.
Some of these sites gave me viewing figures and others gave me the ratio of men to women viewers.

15. Statistics on BARB shows that The Walking Dead had 840 thousand viewers when it was shown during the week of Feb 18th-24th, which was the second most viewed show during the week Feb 18th- Feb 24th on Channel FX.

16. Stats for premier and finale of season 1 and 2
(Season 3 is currently running so we could not collect the data required here)
Season 1 had 6 episodes
5.35 million premiere viewers
5.97 million Finale viewers
Season 2 had 13 episodes
7.26 million premiere viewers
8.99 million premiere viewers
As you can see, there is a considerable difference between season 1 and 2.

18. Synopsis
Media Producers need to research and define their audience carefully. From the research, I have found that the audience it nearly equal male and female. It is a niche audience that is strongly growing. 75% of the reviews giving where positive and show that critics and fans love the show. The producers have clearly put a lot of effort into fine tuning their show to be perfect for viewers. The show has made AMC very popular and has made them shoot past the other leading providers such as ABC and CBS.