How Do media professionals "Know" their audiences?

Media professionals know their audience through product research. The media professionals have to decide what they are going to produce based on their marketplace, audience, and in the structure in which they operate. They have to get to know their market through surveys and feedback, product sales, reviews, and ratings. However, the information we receive from media professionals is also based on their personal opinions and ideology. In fact, we may not be getting the whole truth because the media they produce is partially based on what they want us to know or what they think is the most important for us to know. Product research may be a lot easier for a local news channel that operates in New Jersey than a media agency which maintains itself in a global market.

Media professionals who produce globally distributed media texts have to get to know their audience once they have surpassed the restraints of organizational and external factors. Some organizational factors are the specific routines of production, ownership structure, editorial line while external factors are imposed on the organization by things such as the economic power of advertisers, the laws concerning libel or defamation, and the willingness of the economically powerful to co-operate in the production of the media texts. Product research on a global scale has surpassed simple surveys and ratings. Methods now include observation, participant observation, interviews, case studies, archival research, and detailed analyses of public and private documents. This is a job not just done by one person, but a group of people. Media professionals want people to "jump in" and do the research on an interpersonal level so that their product will be successful.

An example of globally distributed media is the movie High School Musical. It has become a worldwide phenomenon, although produced in the United States in English. The team of market researchers had to have asked themselves the question of how they could get the movie to sell worldwide. Product research on a global scale has gone passed knowing your audience. It has become the pushing and promotion of the product, through sources like iTunes (already used worldwide) at a target audience. People responded to this media because of the way it was advertised.

However, in some cases such as the news, it is easy to worry that we are not getting the whole truth. The critical theory of product research described in the book describes the extent to which media professionals knowingly engage in the production of dominant ideology in the support of the ruling class or other dominant social groups. Are they leaving people out? Are they only telling us what they want us to know? It is a scary thought, and as a people we need to realize that media professionals are trying to sell something. They are researching our wants and needs to promote a product they have to offer that will make them money. We need to analyze everything that we are given and not hold everything to be the truth.