Traditional Audience Research Articles

Decomposing Audience Costs: Bringing the Audience Back into Audience Cost Theory

According to a growing tradition in International Relations, one way governments can credibly signal their intentions in foreign policy crises is by creating domestic audience costs: leaders can tie their hands by publicly threatening to use force since domestic publics punish leaders who say one thing and do another. We argue here that there are actually two logics of audience costs: audiences can punish leaders both for being inconsistent (the traditional audience cost), and for threatening to use force in the first place (a belligerence cost). We employ an experiment that disentangles these two rationales, and turn to a series of dispositional characteristics from political psychology to bring the audience into audience cost theory. Our results suggest that traditional audience cost experiments may overestimate how much people care about inconsistency, and that the logic of audience costs (and the implications for crisis bargaining) varies considerably with the leader's constituency.

Audiencia social en España: Estrategias de éxito en la televisión nacional

El presente trabajo de investigación aborda el concepto de audiencia social, nuevo espacio narrativo nacido de la convergencia de la audiencia televisiva y las conversaciones de usuarios en Twitter, analizando las estrategias de los programas de la televisión española con mayor impacto social. Entender qué es exactamente la audiencia social, cómo funciona o qué tipo de mediciones se realizan de la misma se hace más necesario que nunca para ahondar en los usos y oportunidades que supone tanto para el medio televisivo como para los anunciantes, que deciden invertir en un espacio determinado. A través del estudio de casos exitosos ya implantados se pretende establecer fórmulas de éxito que logren una participación aún más activa de los usuarios, el trasvase de audiencia social a la audiencia tradicional y la inclusión ventajosa de las marcas en este nuevo escenario comunicacional cargado de posibilidades.

Intersections of Dance and Poetry in Post-Industrial Michigan

In post-industrial Michigan cities of Flint and Detroit, there is a need for art that brings residents together while addressing community issues. Collaborations in dance and poetry engage both traditional and nontraditional audiences while creating a unique visual and audio performance. Separately, the art forms receive less interest. Performing together outdoors, dance and poetry receive more viewer attention, while in traditional dance settings, the message of the two forms is reinforced by one another. “Intersections of Dance and Poetry in Post-Industrial Michigan” examines five collaborations in Flint and Detroit that address community issues while reaching across divisions of class and culture.

The changing dynamics of television consumption in the multimedia living room

This increasingly saturated media environment potentially alters how viewers engage with televisual media and with each other. In this respect, we address how mobile devices, such as tablets, have entered our living rooms and alter TV’s social uses and practices. By means of in-depth interviews, we revisit the enquiry of the audience in the living room context, with specific attention to Lull’s typology of social uses. The study shows the use of these mobile Internet devices in front of the TV is integrated in our everyday TV viewing behavior. In addition, we recognize the complex nature of physical and verbal avoidance and affiliation in a multiscreen living room. Participants personally consume media content in the presence of other family members, which allows physical contact but reduces the opportunities for conversation. In addition, these computer technologies allow online sociability, which we label as ‘outbound affiliation’. These tendencies are discussed in a broader understanding of contemporary (media) culture, with a particular focus on the reflexive audience and the related broader process of individualization. In conclusion, we understand the findings as emerging trends that are likely to evolve in the future. In addition, we define the value of traditional audience research as well as the necessity to understand the mediated nature of audience conversations.

Transitioning Nutrition Education Programming Delivery to Online Formats

As resources decline and clientele demographics change, educators working in informal settings are challenged to maintain programs for traditional adult audiences while using new strategies to reach nontraditional audiences. By combining traditional and online methods, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) Extension has leveraged resources to provide effective nutrition and physical activity programming to participants statewide.

Audience Valuation in the New Media Era: Interactivity, Online Engagement, and Electronic Word-of-Mouth Value

This national survey of broadband users (N = 200) investigates people’s participatory behavior on Internet video websites by analyzing their use of interactive features. It seeks to identify a group of “interactive audiences” who take full advantage of web interactivity and may be most valuable to advertisers. This study defined audience interactivity based on people’s frequency in using interactive features and three groups were identified—non-interactive audience, average audience, and interactive audience. It compared three audience groups based on traditional audience valuation criteria such as demographics and media consumption levels, as well as newly proposed criteria including online engagement level and electronic word-of-mouth value. Results indicated that interactive audiences are younger, more engaged online, and have higher electronic word-of-mouth value than non-interactive audiences. Because audience interactivity is related to audience value, findings suggest that advertisers should invest more in this highly engaged and influential group online. The results also reveal the need for expanding audience valuation criteria, particularly in the online space, to include other variables such as online engagement level and electronic word-of-mouth influence. The study then offers practical implications for website managers and marketers.

Different Approaches to Caring for Historic Collections

The “National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty” (NT) is called upon daily to address such questions at over 300 historic houses which form part of its holdings of buildings, countryside and coast. This paper will consider five case studies which demonstrate different methods of presentation and conservation of collections in the historic house context. None are traditional museums, but all are places that are exploring new ways of thinking and may perhaps appeal to less traditional historic house audiences or be relevant to different communities. All have been the focus of internal discussion to define management and interpretative processes relevant to the individual property which place conservation and interpretation at the core of the visitor experience. All use the “real thing” as the foundation for the offer that they make, yet have been required to debate and identify what the “real thing” actually means in the context of their property.

The Audience Experience: A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts Edited by Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow, and Katya Johanson (review)

Reviewed by: The Audience Experience: A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts Edited by Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow, and Katya Johanson Cason Murphy The Audience Experience: A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts. Edited by Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow, and Katya Johanson. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2013; pp. 160. There is a monumental shift occurring in the current artistic marketplace in regards to what audiences are expecting from the live arts performances they attend. Many arts practitioners are desperate just to keep the core audiences they have already built; others look nervously toward revolutionary new ways to generate effective, innovate strategies to measure and market the “fun,” “socially relevant,” and “educational” elements that make theatre so compelling. Whether or not they are ready and able to commit to change, these organizations have no doubt already been discussing the hows and whys in hushed voices during board meetings or at intermissions of half-filled matinees. The Audience Experience makes a valiant attempt to address these questions through the new discipline of “audience experience research,” a school of thought that combines new and traditional modes of surveying audiences of arts events. Through eleven essays by leading researchers in this emergent field, this book runs the gamut of exploring recent phenomena of digital streaming, cocuration, and convergence marketing, as well as redefining the traditional audience by interviewing samples of children, adults, amateurs, and professionals alike—all in hopes of finding something tangible behind ever-mercurial audience behavior. Having only gained traction during the past twenty years, audience experience research is still effectively in its embryonic stage as far as research fields go. Yet, this collection offers a good overview of the myriad research methodologies, analytical tools, and industry technology used in quantifying that elusive “audience experience.” One cannot help but feel the sense of urgency in the arts world today that is informed by the belt-tightening demanded in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. A repeated referent is arts administrator Ben Cameron, who, since 2009, has sent shockwaves through the established arts community by repeatedly questioning the need for a “professional artist” in creative endeavors. At times, some of the essays rely upon buzzwords that are almost too slick—jargony concepts like audience reach and cultural intermediation come to mind—but the contributors featured in The Audience Experience avoid veering too far into the Chicken Little “sky is falling” territory. The book’s three editors—Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow, and Katya Johanson—contribute the first, outstanding chapter, “Knowing and Measuring the Audience Experience.” Here, a basic terminology is laid out clearly and concisely for readers, conceived as an index measuring audience engagement through attributes of knowledge, risk, authenticity, and collective engagement. In the case study that makes up the rest of the chapter, the authors test their index on two different Australian arts organizations: a small, independent nonprofit house, and the other a mid-sized, regional for-profit theatre. When the results come they may seem logical, but the market-research component gives the chapter’s conclusions a certain concreteness. This basic formula sets the stage for many of the other essays: research questions are posed, specific ethnographic audiences are chosen, methodologies are implemented, charts and graphs are made, and (usually) the concluding information is extrapolated into broader ideas about what we (ourselves, an audience) can make of it. Yet, the most exciting chapters manage to transcend this formulaic feel and inject humor, passion, and applicable real-world ideas into their findings. A fascinating example of this practical application is Matthew Reason’s “The Longer Experience: Theatre for Young Audiences and Enhancing Engagement” (chapter 7). In it, he attempts to reconcile the research around a group of Scottish grade-schoolers’ negative engagement with Echoa, a popular dance performance marketed for young people. Despite that Echoa has played 500 performances across the globe and garnered rave reviews from critics, parents, and other young audiences, these Scottish kids hated it. Instead of treating his respondents like baffling test subjects, Reason flips the script and engages with his audience through the scientific process; the heart, humor, and personalities of the students and Reason himself converge and make for some sublime reading...

Through the kaleidoscope: media consumption patterns in the participatory cross-media era

The paper aims to identify actual media audiences of different mass- and non-mass media types through identifying those audience clusters consuming not different but differentiable media mixes. A major concern of the study is to highlight the transformation of mass media audiences when technology, digitalization and participation behaviors are able to reshape traditional audience forms and media diets, which may directly affect the traditional media value chain and in turn the thinking and decision making of media managers. Through such a kaleidoscope the authors examined media use and consumption patterns using an online self-reported questionnaire. They developed different media consumer clusters as well as media consumption mixes. Based on the results of the study the authors can state that internet use is today’s main base of media consumption, and as such it is becoming the real mass media, replacing television. However this “new” media has a completely different structure, being more fragmented with smaller audience reach. At the same time, television is keeping its audience. However, there are emerging segments self-reporting non- or light television viewing. This is how the question of the viewer-television relation among different television viewer clusters evolves. At the same time only gaming exhibited demographic differentiation of audiences based on gender.

‘Diaspora girls doing identities’: Creating ideal television programmes and narratives of the self

This article reports on the results of a visual ethnographic case study with teenage diaspora girls living in Belgium. It analyses how second-generation girls of Turkish descent perform identities through the visualization of and reflection on their ideal television programme. This article starts from an intersectional and performance approach to identity, then explores what happens when diaspora girls ‘do television’; it contributes to the knowledge of what young females ‘do’ with media texts and moves beyond the conventional interview methods within audience research. Results show that when participants produce collages of their ideal television programmes, they reflexively engage in providing a narrative of the self and in performing identities. The cases identified with a broad spectrum of shifting subject-positions, often transgressing ethnicity, foregrounding age and gender. Visual ethnography complemented by traditional audience research techniques proved to be useful in approaching issues such as identity performance and the role of media.

PRM86 - Health economic modeling methods from an ACO provider perspective

The traditional audience for US health economic (HE) models has been payers, but the changing health care reimbursement environment suggests a stronger role for provider-perspective models. The US health care system is moving toward quality incentive payment schemes and increased risk sharing for providers. This shift in payment will impact provider incentives and priorities as they relate to technology adoption. Here, we look at how the transition from fee-for-service payments to bundled payments in accountable care organizations (ACO) will impact health economic modeling for manufacturers of medical devices. Expert analysis was conducted on a comprehensive review of publicly available literature, in-depth discussions with hospital and ACO administrators, and drawing on lessons learned from developing models for device manufacturers. Relevant model inputs, time horizon, outcomes and structure were examined to provide recommendations for improving the usefulness of HE models for hospital and ACO decision-makers. Of the 6 administrators interviewed, 5 (83.3%) felt that technology adoption decisions will move beyond the individual physician and extend to the system-wide level. When asked to consider what outputs would be most useful for benefit design and coverage decision-making, administrators cited the total cost of procedure (include hospital length-of-stay and hospital resource utilization), post-operative care and cost associated with complications from the procedure, in rank order. ACO administrators reported that time horizons considered as part of budget impact modeling should be extended from the traditional benefit year to up to 3 years, depending on the length of the episode of care. Medical device manufacturers need to create data and tools that demonstrate efficiency gains and cost-effectiveness from a hospital and ACO purchasing strategy. The ability to demonstrate both a clinical and economic value to hospitals and ACOs, who are increasingly the key decision-makers for technology adoption, will be important to achieving successful market access.

King of the Hill? Seeking the New in Audience Research

This article looks at the ways of finding novelty in communication and audience research and questions the necessity to seek constant innovation in conquering new territories in audience research. Based on both personal experiences and those from the PhD students across Europe, the article maps five Basic elements where novelty in audience research is sought—new technologies, new countries, new audiences, interdisciplinarity and cross-media. The article argues that despite the constant pressure to innovate, there are important elements of value in traditional audience research that need to be kept, including methodological diversity and often repeated feel for the triangulation of audiences, producers and text. In this combination of keeping the old and seeking the new in audience research, the discipline can be seen growing richer and more diverse with every added contribution.

A Holonic Approach to Shakespeare: The Digital Reference System (DRS)

Prefatory RemarksWhen hypertext was made available on the Internet after 1994 it shaped the concepts of public domain and free access. The web server and browsing system that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau designed, determined the future digital, editorial and cultural developments for traditional audiences and digital natives alike. They quickly became the generalized interface tools and thus contributed to today's editorial standards. As they helped to create this innovative environment called the Internet, they also helped to establish many standards such as URL, URI, HTTP HTML or XML, which provided interoperability amongst different platforms and allowed internationalization.Shakespeare's texts became part of the interoperable and open network environment which took off after Grady Ward compiled and distributed a public domain version of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the so called Moby Shakespeare, which has been credited as being the most widely distributed version of Shakespeare 's Works in the world. The concepts such as free use, fair use and worldwide distribution, including many practical any platform-applications significantly increased the added value of the emergent digital environment, providing the opportunity to encode, transcode, clone and distribute the best Shakespearean file(s) in digital environment. Gary Taylor and Ian Lancashire have already discussed this issue from an ontological point of view, so we spare the reader a repetition of their arguments.From a computational perspective, and after analyzing both the functionality and quality of the Moby Project, we can say that the main advantage of Grady Ward's proposal is that it allows Internet users to easily access the complete unabridged works of Shakespeare in a digital format (plain text or as TXT), which has produced many important technological advances since it was first published. The disadvantage is that, as David Greetham (348) pointed out, Grady Ward adds nothing to the editorial methodology because as a would-be editor he used as the most authoritative text the famous Globe Edition (1886) edited by W.G. Clark and W.A. Wright. This ideal out-of-copyright edition did not improve upon the computational modern spelling edition of the Riverside Shakespeare's Complete Works by Marvin Spevack (digitized with the IBM 7094 in 1969), nor Trevor Howard-Hill's old spelling concordances (generated with the English Electric KDF9 also in 1969), nor the First Folio facsimile published by Sir Sidney Lee in 1902, which continues to be the most used and popular digital text available for free downloading from the Internet.1In the context of this debate, we undertook an in-depth study of a series of different accessories (also called para-textual elements), which have been added throughout time in most of the standard editions, for example the main functional/dramatic characteristics of textual divisions, character headings, stage directions, etc. We compared the main elements of the sequential line numbering (SLN) system with the famous through line numbering (TLN) system. Having detected their most important inadequacies for today's digital use, which we discuss in the present paper, we developed our own system, which we called either the key line numbering (KLN) or the digital reference system (DRS), depending on what aspect of the proposal we want to stress.Standard Abbreviations for Play-TitlesEach time we want to cite, quote or even concord any verse, line or word of any of Shakespeare's plays we usually make use of traditional and accepted devices such as a sigil (commonly named abbreviation or textual identifier) for the plays' title (Tit. for Titus Andronicus', HAM for Hamlet), followed by act and scene division (I.i. or Il.iii.) and line numbers (I.ii.124-127). We have studied exhaustively almost all existing Shakespearean editions to establish the abbreviation methods used throughout time and decided what could be improved to make these textual identifiers more standard, international, bibliographical and digital. …

Measuring Media Use Across Platforms: Evolving Audience Information Systems

Audience measurement worldwide is responding to the need to measure media consumption across platforms. One approach being employed by the industry is “single source” audience information systems that measure usage across media and purchase behavior from the same set of respondents. This study evaluates the readiness of such systems to meet the current challenges in measuring audiences by analyzing single source systems from five diverse media markets. The analysis reveals that these systems capture dimensions of audience behavior other than exposure—an enhancement over traditional audience information systems. However, their usage in the marketplace suggests that single source data complement existing mono media systems than serve as alternate currencies.

Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture Olivia Carter Mather Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture. By Jonathan Silverman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. [xi, 278 p. ISBN 9781558498266 (hardcover), $80; ISBN 9781558498273 (paperback), $26.95.] Illustrations, endnotes, index. When country musician Johnny Cash died in 2003, he had in some sense climbed to the height of his career. With award-winning albums produced by Rick Rubin (known for his work in hip-hop) and outreach to new markets (NPR listeners and MTV viewers), he did what other aging country stars had failed to do: stage a lasting comeback with new material. Cash's career had begun at Sun Records in Memphis alongside those of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. With his first few hits in hand, he signed with Columbia and wound his way through folk and gospel, but had the biggest album successes of his career with recordings dubbed live at prison performances (At Folsom Prison [1968] and At San Quentin [1969]). By the mid 1970s, Cash's career had begun to decline, at least in terms of the music industry's definition of success. His label dropped him in the 1980s and country radio virtually ignored him (as well as other stars of his generation) in favor of new, younger acts. How then did Cash regain cultural relevance? Or had he lost it in the first place? What would account for multiple Country Music Association and Grammy awards in the years surrounding his death? And why did listeners outside of his traditional audience begin buying his records? These are some of the questions that Jonathan [End Page 579] Silverman sets out to answer in his book Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture. Silverman's work is a welcome addition to a growing subfield in studies of Cash, as well as the broader fields of country music and American culture. Over the past six years, biographies, academic books, at least one dissertation, and the biopic of Cash's life Walk the Line (2005) have mined his image and music. Silverman's contribution is not in the area of biography or musical analysis but interpretation. He attempts to explain Cash's career through a very particular lens, that of Cash's own choices about his life and career. Silverman's theoretical underpinning serves also as a main argument of the book, that everything, including an individual's decisions, can be "read" as a text. By focusing on how Cash made the choices he did (when intent is recoverable or even known), the context in which he made them, and their effects on his career, the author presents new and nuanced understandings of his subject. When dealing with a figure of the complexity and symbolic weight of Cash, an author may be tempted to present the subject as static or mysterious. Silverman's method protects him from these pitfalls by demystifying Cash and allowing the reader to see him as a complex, inconsistent, and even irrational human being. At the same time, the author detects persistent patterns that underscore a storyline. As the title indicates, Silverman has organized the book around nine choices that Cash made about his life and career, with each chapter devoted to one of the choices. The chapters are ordered chronologically, beginning with Cash's move to Memphis at the start of his recording career, and ending with his and his family's hiring of Sotheby's to auction items left in the Cash estate after his death and that of his wife June Carter Cash. In between we learn of his marriages, his faith, his relationship to Columbia, his politics, his attention to prison reform, and so on, each framed in terms of Cash's own agency. Silverman covers every period in the performer's career, often bouncing between his first success in the 1950s and his 1990s comeback within the course of any given chapter. What at first glance would seem too narrow a focus (a small selection of Cash's actions) provides balance to the project; limiting each chapter to one choice allows Silverman to be at once specific and general, since he uses the main...

Subtle futures

ABSTRACTThis article explores the impact of the digital world on opera and questions whether ‘digital’ is simply a fashionable bolt-on construct within the conventions of opera, or whether it represents a pivotal moment when a new order of transformative phenomena fundamentally changes our experience and cognition of performance. While the avant-garde will continue to challenge our intellectual and emotional psyche with or without digitization, a new breed of artists is currently reinventing the medium of opera, redefining notions of time and space, and blurring traditional distinctions between performer, audience and the fourth wall. Intelligent, informed and musically literate audiences exist, ready to engage with a plethora of alternate media forms, of which opera is not generally one. If subtle technologies enable us radically to alter opera, turning it into an entirely new state that can connect with such audiences, these technologies should be embraced. Some form of hybrid opera formulated from games play, thematic entertainments and reactive architecture might well repel traditional opera audiences, but it might represent the injection that I argue opera needs.

Managing Media Relations: Determining the Reputation of Land Grant Institutions from the Perspective of Media Professionals

In recent years, the land grant university has struggled with public awareness outside of its traditional audiences, indicating a potential disconnect between the general public and the media. The purpose of this study was to assess the perceptions and awareness of media with regard to the image and reputation of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). A sample of 150 state and local media professionals was surveyed to assess perceptions and awareness of UF/IFAS. The results indicated that the media’s perceptions of UF/IFAS image and reputation were positive, but their awareness of the institution’s range of program areas was low. Media professionals consider the information provided by UF/IFAS to be credible, useable, and newsworthy. Respondents said the environment, followed by disaster preparation and recovery were the most important topics to their target audience, while the least important topics to their target audience were 4-H youth development and agriculture. Media professionals were more likely to use UF/IFAS as a source for agriculture and natural resource topics than other topics. Other universities should consider conducting similar research to develop a body of knowledge on media relations at land grant institutions.

'Paranoia, paranoia, everybody's coming to get me': Peep Show, sitcom, and the surveillance society

This essay examines the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show. The programme employs an innovative shooting style in which the audience is aligned with the characters' points-of-view, and also has access to the inner thoughts of its main protagonists. It is argued that in distinguishing between social action and unrestrained subconscious thoughts the programme demonstrates the effects of social norms on behaviour. This idea is related to Foucault's notion of the panopticon, in which surveillance becomes an everyday aspect of contemporary living. The essay also shows how the particularities of the sitcom genre have always been about issues of looking and surveillance, and that the shooting style adopted by Peep Show may call the traditional audience positions offered by sitcoms into question.

A theoretical framework for the online consumer response process

This article describes the foundation and development of a theoretical framework for the online consumer response process. It is based on theoretical criteria for web-based commercial communication and the online consumer response process. Central to this article is the development of the concept of web-based commercial communication. This includes all advertising, marketing communication, public relations and promotional messages on the World Wide Web which are intended to move the consumer through certain response phases to the point of purchasing or proceeding to any other type of action; the identification of the marketing communication paradigm shift from offline to online; and the comparison between online and traditional mass media audience characteristics. A theoretical conceptualisation of the online consumer response process is undertaken and an analysis of consumer response models and the theory of the general consumer response process is performed. This article is a theoretical exploration of the phenomenon of ‘online consumer response’ and the proposed theoretical framework is intended to address the dearth of literature on the topic.

Adapting Femininities

Adapting Femininities