Transmedia Project Level Design Tasks - Audience

Understanding the audience is an essential part of storytelling. Telling a great story to the wrong audience can make the story fall flat. The author of a transmedia project needs to identify who the audience for that project is and what its characteristics are. With this information in hand, the transmedia author can look at the project’s theme, genre and characteristics and make adjustments to either project or target audience as required.  

Audience Demographics

The demographic profile of your audience should tell you about their key characteristics – age, gender, race, ethnicity, where they live (urban, suburban, or rural), income level, price and time sensitivity, their favorite brands, and so on.

Audience Psychographic Profile

Psychographics is an approach used by marketers to understand the motivational and cognitive drives of a target audience. The psychographic profile tells you more about the personality, values, attitudes, lifestyles, social goals, and interests of your audience. A psychographic profile differs from the more traditional demographic profile of your audience, although they should be used together to get a better picture of the audience segments.

Psychographics can easily be misunderstood or incorrectly applied. It's quite common to contrast them with demographic variables such as age and gender, or with behavioral variables such as usage rate. In fact psychographic variables and the other major analytic variables work in concert. Each is related to the other and affects the other. A marketing approach that is focused solely on one such area can miss critically important information.

Psychographics remain a valuable tool in effective market segmentation, since lifestyle, attitude, emotions and preferences are crucial factors in analyzing how consumers and business people allocate their money. Demographic and behavioral analyses give detail and data, but psychographics is needed for understanding the consumer in depth. (Market Segmentation Services, 2008)

Content Consumer Type
The type of content consumer your audience is will influence how you structure your transmedia narrative. For example, if you find that the majority of your audience consists of single story consumers that are only going to stick you for one story you may want to rethink the whole transmedia approach.

A good story well told may keep single media consumers coming back if you provide them with a series of live action videos but you risk losing them if one episode of your transmedia narrative is video and the next is a comic book and the third is a live event. Perhaps the best strategy is to find one medium that works for most of that audience for the core of the narrative and have a limited number of extensions win other media.

It is the audience that consists of transmedia consumers that you are looking for. These are the consumers who embrace stories told across many different media. These are the ideal transmedia consumers. However, the concept of transmedia narratives is so new that it will take time for the mass audience to become use to this form of storytelling. The best strategy is to exceed this audience’s expectations and have them serve as evangelists for the transmedia project.