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Media Platforms and Industries Lecture Summary -
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Lecture notes of 22 pages for the course Media Platforms and Industries at RuG (-)
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Media Platforms and Industries 1College 1
By Robert Prey
Why study Media Studies and Platforms?
1. Media industries play a pivotal role in ‘organizing the images and discourse through
which people make sense of the world’. your knowledge of the world is basically
created by the media you consume
Framing: we can frame reality. Think about is like when you are taking a photo. When taking
a photo, you are deciding what should be seen and should not be seen. A media producer does
the same thing, they choose what is included and what is left out and therefore frame reality.
2. We should study media studies because all the media know a lot about you.
3. (look the third and first reason up in the seminar slides)
‘This course will introduce students to the contemporary media landscape and the various
social, technological, economic and legal factors that give it shape’. We are going to look
at different industries (advertisement, news, music industry, film etc.) We will study a
different industry every week, the purpose of this course is to understand how they relate to
each other.
Remediation: media have always reformatted and refashioned new media forms, so
whatever is ‘new’ it is always built upon what was existing before it. How media refashion
prior media forms.
Why we study each industry facing each other, because many of the problems facing one
industry are also facing another one.
There are three fundamental issues to think about when studying media industries:
1. Organization: what I the process by which media products come to us? How is their
production organized coordinated and managed?
2. Ownership, size and strategy: how important are the size and ownership of the
media corporations and what I the role of smaller companies?
3. Work: what is the nature of work in the media industries?
The only constant in media is that it is constantly changing.
Media Platforms and Industries
College 2
By Robert Prey
‘The Business of Media’
,Most of the media that you consume is broad to you buy profit making companies.
Today’s missions:
Recognize how media companies consider the audience an integral part of business
concerns
Identify and discuss the process of production distributing and exhibiting materials in
media industries
Explain the way media companies finance the production distribution and exhibition
of media materials
Why does this matter? And why is this important?
Because what they know about you eventually influences what they create for you.
From radio to a business
When radio first broadcasted in 1920 it was seen as a revolutionary media. The radio listeners
constituted the greatest audience ever assembled by any means for any purpose in the history
of the world, as they said in the 1920’s. It was also revolutionary because of the invisibility of
the audience. At its beginning it was a new, exciting, almost mystical phenomenon based on
unseen waves shooting through the atmosphere at the speed of light. No purchase record was
created by the user. There was no newsstand sales or home delivery subscriptions, no box
office, no gate receipt…
So how could broadcasting become a viable business when it’s ‘costumers’ (the listeners)
were invisible? Advertisement was not the obvious reason at the time. There was a lot of
resistance from the listener, they did not want to hear the adds when listening to the radio
while having dinner with their family. But it was not only the listeners who were resistant,
advertisers themselves needed to be persuaded too. Think about it, when you were having a
company and you always put your advertisements in papers, why would you go and broadcast
them on the radio where you do not know who the listeners are?
There was no standardized and agreed upon way to measure the (invisible) listening audience
in radio. But how could you do this?
1. You can make the radio more interactive. One of the reasons the radio became
interactive is because they wanted to figure out who they readers were. They asked
their listeners to send them letters, in order for them to get a record of who those
listeners were. The way the radio makers figured out what the top songs were was in
the same way, by collecting those letters.
But it could not compare with the papers who had very detailed numbers about who their
readers were. So, it was very hard to get the add makers to show their adds on radio.
While targeting (target advertisement) has become much more precise today, advertisements
have always been very precise about knowing who their audiences are. ‘delivering dog-
food ads to dog-food owners’
, If radio was a business, what does it sell? What is the commodity that radio sells? radio
sells listeners. If private radio make revenue from advertisements, who buy time, they give the
advertisers listeners. More precisely they buy ratings. In order to persuade advertisers to buy
time on their stations, (broadcasters) rely on audience research to show how large their
audience is and more important for many advertisers who the audience is. The more appealing
those listeners are to the advertisers, the more revenue they will make.
But the problem is still: how do we measure this? The first formal rating system was launched
in 1929, how did they measure it back then? What they first actually did was through
telephone surveys. They would just call up people and ask them what they are listening to.
But the problem is that the people can lie with a survey, or they could forget.
So, there were a lot of problems with survey and a better option needed to be created. Arthur
C. Nielsen was the one who created this. He created a mechanical device that they attached to
the radio receivers in peoples home and it would make a recording and measure of what
people are listening to. called the audiometer
Still, advertisers did not quite trust this new device and the results that were provided. So, the
radio makers would supplement these measurements of the audiometer by visiting at home
and check. What they would do when coming into someone’s house, is that they would look
under the sinks and in the bathroom to see if the people bought the products that were
advertised.
Alongside this very invasive visit, these home visit would also be very useful because they
had demographic information about the people who were listening to the radio.
How do media corporations construct their audiences?
The audience is constructed in four broad ways. Demographics, psychographics, behavioral
information and lifestyle categories. The word ‘constructed’ is interesting here, because these
audiences are built out of the way they are measured. How you chose to measure your
audience affects the way how you understand them.
1. Demographic: refers to the characteristics by which people are divided in particular
social categories like age, gender, income, occupation, ethnicity and race
2. Psychographics: refers to the ways of differentiating among people according to
attitudes, personality types and motivations
3. Lifestyle: a way of categorizing people according to their activities or hobbies like
sports or travel that mark people as different from others in the population at large
4. Behavioral information: tracking online behavior (time spend on site, products
viewed etc).
The only thing that really matter for psychographics is that you only need to link a product to
a single stereotypical characteristic. They are only interested in your characteristics so that
they can target their products to you.
There is a lot of work put in to try to figure out who the audience is and in trying to
understand the audience. This is not just a representation of the audience but also a
construction of the audience, they built the audience using certain techniques like
psychographics in trying to figure out who their targeting. All media content must be created
with a target audience in mind.
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