Target Audiences`

Your target audience is the mass market you're trying to appeal to. For example a film like "Curiouse George" is obviously marketed to children rather than audlts. Working to what your target audience want to see helps to make you media output more successful in the market place.
There are 4 theorys deciding how this works,

Hypodermic Syringe Theory
This theory dates back to the 1920s and trys to explain how mass audience reacts to mass media. the theory suggests that, as an audience, we are manipulated by the creators of media texts, and that our behaviour and thinking might be easily changed by media-makers. It assumes that the audience are complient and heterogenous. Meaning that the mass audience is diverse but accepts what ever the media maker whats them to believe and accept.

Two Step Fl0w Theory

The Hypodermic theory proved to be less true and correct as is was first thought to explain the relationship between audience and media text. As media became more of a part in people lives, and did not reduce the population to a mass unthinking drones, a more correct throry was needed. Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters' decision-making processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The People's Choice. Their results show that the media did not flow directly into the audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow.

Uses & Gratifications

During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown ups, it became increasingly obviouse to people that analysised media, that audiences made choices about what they did when seeing texts. Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society:
-surveillance
-correlation
-entertainment
-cultural transmission

Researchers Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, stating that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes (ie uses and gratifications):
Diversion - escape from everyday problems and routine.
Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, eg) substituting soap operas for family life
Personal Identity - finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts
Surveillance - Information which could be useful for living eg) weather reports, financial news, holiday bargains
Since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been extended, particularly as new media forms have come along (eg video games, the internet)