Targeting Audiences: Marketing, Trailers and Viral Campaigns
Who Is the Product For?
Before a media organisation invests in production, it must decide who the product is intended to reach. A target audience is the specific group at whom a product is aimed. The target audience shapes every decision — the storylines chosen, the celebrities cast, the platforms used, the price charged. Without a clear target audience, marketing spending is wasted.
A target audience is often divided into a primary audience and a secondary audience. A magazine pitched at women aged 25–35 may also attract younger or older readers who share its interests — those are the secondary audience. Producers do not necessarily design for them, but they welcome them.
Mass and Niche Audiences
Media products can target either a mass audience or a niche audience. A mainstream national daily newspaper tries to reach the widest possible readership; a specialist cycling magazine is produced for a small group with a defined passion. The economics of the two are quite different: mass-audience products attract large advertising revenues; niche products often charge subscription premiums because they deliver advertisers a highly targeted, engaged readership that is harder to reach through mainstream channels.
Niche audiences are commercially valuable because they deliver advertisers a concentrated, highly engaged group. Advertisers often pay a premium for access to a defined niche rather than broadcasting to a mass audience where most members are not potential customers.
Assumptions Organisations Make About Audiences
Media producers rarely have direct contact with their audience. Instead they build an audience profile — a set of assumptions about who is likely to be watching, reading, listening or playing. These assumptions are built from research: surveys, focus groups, ratings data and increasingly from behavioural data collected online. Assumptions can also be shaped by stereotypes of certain demographic groups, which is one reason why audience profiles sometimes reinforce existing inequalities.
Genre conventions play a part here too. A horror film producer makes assumptions about who enjoys that genre based on prior audience data — and those assumptions then shape the marketing approach, the certificate sought from the classifier, and the platforms where the product is promoted.
The trailer is one of the oldest audience-targeting tools in media. A trailer condenses the appeal of a product into 60–180 seconds, targeting the assumed audience through music, cast, pace, and the moments selected. A teaser is shorter — often only 30 seconds — and deliberately withholds more information in order to build anticipation and conversation. A taster, more common in broadcasting, offers a brief clip or preview episode to give audiences a genuine sense of the content without fully revealing it.
Each type of promotional material makes choices about what to emphasise and what to conceal. A streaming-era teen drama might release a teaser that focuses on the emotional relationships between characters rather than the plot twist at the series’ end, because the target audience’s interest has been identified as character-driven. Those choices reflect assumptions about the audience.
Viral and Guerrilla Marketing
Viral marketing attempts to generate audience momentum without (or alongside) conventional paid advertising. The goal is for audiences to share, discuss and amplify the content themselves — making them unpaid distributors of the marketing message. An effective viral campaign exploits curiosity, humour, emotion or social identity to motivate sharing.
Guerrilla marketing uses surprise, spectacle or novelty to create shareable moments. A product might appear overnight on city hoardings without explanation, leaving audiences curious; an unusual public stunt or pop-up installation might generate news coverage and social media posts without any paid placement. The logic is that earned media — coverage and discussion that isn’t bought — carries more credibility than advertising because it appears organic.
Viral marketing relies on audiences sharing content voluntarily across digital platforms. Guerrilla marketing creates surprise encounters in unexpected physical or digital spaces to generate word-of-mouth and news coverage. Both aim to reach audiences without relying solely on paid advertising.
Social Media Activations and ARGs
Contemporary marketing campaigns extend across multiple platforms. Social media activations coordinate posts, countdowns, and interactive challenges across platforms to build anticipation and engage target audiences directly. An alternate reality game (ARG) goes further: clues are planted across websites, social platforms and physical spaces, inviting audiences to become investigators who unravel a story. ARGs work especially well for products targeting digitally engaged younger audiences who enjoy participatory, puzzle-based experiences.
Marketing professionals think in three categories. Paid media is advertising you buy: sponsored posts, television commercials, banner ads. Owned media is content you control directly: your official social media accounts, website, and branded YouTube channel. Earned media is coverage and discussion generated by others: a journalist writing about your campaign, a fan community speculating about your product, or viewers sharing your trailer. A modern marketing campaign tries to convert paid media investment into earned media reach, which carries credibility because it is not perceived as advertising.