Broadcasting vs. Narrowcasting

Broadcasting vs. Narrowcasting

• Broadcasting: Focuses on a mass audience. Goal is the largest audience possible. Emphasizes "least objectionable programming" for broad appeal.
• Narrowcasting: Focuses on niche audiences desired by advertisers. Goal is to reach a specific niche. Content is tailored to that niche.

Audience Segmentation

• Audience segmentation divides audiences into useful categories for marketers.
• Media products target specific demographic groups who spend and use media in predictable ways.
• Four forms of segmentation:
  • Geographic (less useful in the era of national brands).
  • Demographic (e.g., gender, age, education).
  • Lifestyle (e.g., interests, hobbies).
  • Psychographic (e.g., personality characteristics).

Data Collection

• Profiles contain individual consumer data points.
• Databases are constantly updated collections of user profiles.
• First-party data is collected by the platform.
• Third-party data is purchased from data brokers.
• Interactive microtargeting (like Einstein) uses aggregated data points to profile and target consumers.

Interactive Microtargeting Benefits

• Decrease irrelevant information.
• Automated (no human intervention).
• Compiled with little/no user access.
• Limited ability to guarantee accuracy.
• No limits on data duration (historical data is kept).
• No way to distinguish public vs. private data.

Two Understandings of the Child Audience

1. Media Industry:

   • Children are desirable and lucrative demographic.
   • Kids consume media frequently.
   • Media fosters brand loyalty. (Conditioning technique).

2. Protectionist:

   • Children are seen as innocent and requiring protection.
   • Kids are unable to distinguish good tastes from bad.
   • Consumption is a passive activity.

Children and TV: Why?

• TV provides a window to the larger world.
• TV can be a teaching tool.
• Educational curricula and social/emotional curriculum are included in TV programming.

Screen Content for Children

• Broadcast programming blocks (mostly on PBS).
• Cable channels target children.
• Video sharing services; (U.S. & global; short and long form; user created & adult created).

Online Affinity Networks (Pfister & Martin)

• Youth Online Participation:

  • "Friendship-driven" (offline connections that come online).
  • "Interest-driven" (affinity outside immediate community).

• Three common features of OANs:

  • Specialized (focused on an interest).
  • Engagement via niche (boost engagement).

Intentional, Open Fandom

• Intentional: Opt-in, opt-out, can be "exclusionary."
• Open: easily discoverable, shareable, visible content.

Productivity Practices of Consumption

• Fandom:
• Interpretation
• Speculation
• Projection
• Discussion

Defining Fandom

• High engagement.
• Close Scrutiny.
• Social Practice: Public Display.
• Fandom is heightened typical behaviors and pleasures.

Black Fandoms

• Intervention approach used to describe Black Fandoms vs. other types of Fandoms.
• Discourse used to define Black Fandom.
  • Must-see Blackness (civic duty)
  • Economic consumption (monetary support)
  • Pedagogical properties teaching tools)

Fandom Online

• The internet makes fandom behavior easier. Includes information-seeking, consumption, and backstage access.

Cultural Production

• Fans build upon/transform texts (e.g.; products of art, craft, or media).
• Production, distribution, and exhibition are facilitated by new technologies.
• Cultural productions express underserved cultural needs.

Industrial Utility of Fandom

• Fandom is not just a community, but an industrial construct, supported by consumption, not critique.
• It is built on heavy transmedia consumption.

Critical Media Policy

• A lens to explore media, power, and society.
• Not just a technocratic exercise in problem-solving.

Interpretative Policy Analysis

• Looks at how “values, meanings, and systems of power” influence policy.
  • Examines who gets to decide what "sexual content" is.

Political Economy

• Political economy reveals how economic powers influence policy.

Cultural Policy

• How policy uses cultural forms to manage behavior (e.g., sexual content regulation).

Media Policy

• Formal and informal rules influencing media production, distribution, and consumption.
  • Government regulation.
  • Self-regulation by the industry.
  • Pressure from citizens/groups.

Regulations vs. Deregulation

• How can policymakers ensure competition between media businesses? Regulations (government oversight) vs. Deregulation (removal of regulations).

Media Mergers and Conglomerates

• Media companies merge through buyouts.
• Media conglomerates own several media divisions within a corporation.
• Vertical Integration (production, distribution, and exhibition in a single division).
• Horizontal Integration (owning many media divisions).

Synergy

• Coordination across media divisions, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, (1+1=3)
• Can make companies more or less efficient depending on success.