Task 8 - Audience Classification

There are a range of techniques that you can be used to classify audiences for the TV advertising industry. This is referred to as Audience Profiling.

This allows the researcher to find out the profile of the audience before hand so that you can put across your message to the right people in the most effective way to produce the best result. 

It might include details like age, sex, educational qualification, work experience, financial background, field of work, interests, mood, orientation, bias, food habits, religious background, physique, health condition etc. 

Demographics

A common and traditional method of audience profiling is known as demographics. This defines the adult population largely by the work that they do. 

The NRS social grades are a system of demographic classification used in the United Kingdom. They were originally developed by the National Readership Survey to classify readers, but are now used by many other organisations for wider applications and have become a standard for market research. They were developed over 50 years ago and achieved widespread usage in 20th Century Britain.

SOC - Standard Occupational Classification System is a more detailed United States system of classifying occupations. It is used by U.S. federal government agencies collecting occupational data, enabling comparison of occupations across data sets. It is designed to cover all occupations in which work is performed for pay or profit, reflecting the current occupational structure in the United States. The 2010 SOC included 840 occupational types.

Psychographics

This is a way of describing an audience by looking at their behaviour and personality traits. Psychographics labels a particular type of person and makes an assessment about their viewing and spending habits. 

The advertising agency Young and Rubican invented a successful psychographic profile known as their 4C’s  Marketing Model, which stands for Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation.

They put the audience into groups with labels that suggest their position in society.

Geodemographics

In short, geodemography is the study of people based on where they live. Geodemographic systems estimate the most probable characteristics of people based on the pooled profile of all people living in a small area near a particular address.