Essay 2 MECO1001 Question 1

Question 1:
How do media audiences’ function in a digital media landscape? Referring to at least
one case study of media audiences in action, or inaction, to support your argument.

As the main role of media is a medium of communication, the receiver is an

indispensable component in a complete communication process. A receiver could be
reader, listener, observer or decoder, and the most common name for it is ‘audience’.
As Nightingale (1996) mentioned that while people depend on media, media even
depend more on people, this statement gives the sense of media and audience are the
two complementary parts which mean the role or function of media cannot be
implemented without audiences. However, the function of an audience in digital media
landscape could be varied in different perspectives, such as the commodified audiences
in digital marketing, audience activities like psychology are able to drive the contents
of media or decisions of media senders, for example, the ‘Hungerithm’ campaign of
Snickers. On the other hand, one of the major focus in audience research is ‘fan’ studies,
there are several fields of fan communities such as idol fan culture would demonstrate
the audiences’ function in a digital media landscape in forms of the audience formation
in fan communities like fan café and being a ‘producer’ in a TV program.

In this generation, the digital media landscape is dominating in the mass media
communication, and it is changing at a fast speed. One of the biggest digital media
shifts in recent year is from traditional marketing to digital marketing (Upside Digital,
2016). Marketing is the action and process of businesses for promoting and
communicating their products or services to customers, partners, and society at large.
Marketing is always about connecting the right target customer in right place and at the
right time (Alexander, 2019), businesses are always working on the new content which
could reach wider audiences and capture new customers. However, like the fact that 5%
increasing on internet usage among adult in last three years (Alexander, 2019),
marketing transferred the right ‘place’ for achieving more audiences, it is more

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frequently participating in digital media landscape such as the social media, and this
form of marketing is called digital marketing. Digital marketing contains all marketing
efforts in the digital media landscape, by using several digital tactics to connect with
customers (Alexander, 2019), and this is the commercialization of the media. The
definition of ‘media audience’ depends on the perspectives in the role of
communication. When the communication is done by selling and promoting
commodities, while a passive audience in media becomes an active customer through
digital media landscape, a media audience could define as potential markets for
products and services in marketing (Zayim, n.d.), this could point out the argument that
the goal of marketing is to reach the maximum target audiences. According to the report
on Global Media research (Chaffey, 2019), the social media penetration in worldwide
is 45% compared to the total population, which means it is the best environment for
using media effects on digital marketing. In this case, audience activities on social
media are the main determinant for the content of digital marketing tactics, and
customers are the commodified audience. The commodified audience is often
functioning by separating groups of the audience into categories by interest. For the
purpose of delivering certain content to the appropriated audience, the audience is
continuously segmented and differentiated by particular marketers (Ross & Nightingale,
2003). There are many types of platforms or channels for social media marketing, such
as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, businesses usually operate contents of promotion
in forms of advertisement to increase the awareness for the brands, the social media
segmentation strategies are the way to find the target audience. One of the common
methods for market segmentation in social media is the psychographics of audiences,
this method is to explore and understanding audiences’ attitude, opinions, interest,
actions, passion points and motivations (Fennemore, n.d., slide 16). The audience’s
psychology on social media, it is showing on the ‘audience profile’, because most of
the audiences treat social media as an extension of their own persona, they are posting
their interest, beliefs and entire identity (Lee, 2013). So, audiences and their
psychograph on social media play an important role in the content of digital marketing.

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There is an example of social media marketing on exploring the customers’ or

commodified audiences’ psychology, which is the ‘Hungerithm’ campaign created by
the confectionary brand- Snickers. The Snickers launched the advertising campaign in
Australia and having a partnership with 7/11 stores for changing the price of its
chocolate bar based on the mood of internet and the duration of this campaign was 5
weeks in 2016 (Digital Training Academy, 2017). Snickers Australia wanted to create
the statement that ‘You’re Not You When You’re Hungry’, so that ‘Hungerithm’
campaign stands for a hunger-based algorithm, and this is implemented by monitoring
the mood of Twitter users with their real-time moods posted on tweets, when waves of
anger go up, the price of Snicker chocolate bar in every 7/11 stores in Australia would
go down (Digital Training Academy, 2017). For instance, when the mood of internet
feeling ‘PRETTY CHILL’, the price of Snickers was AU$1.75, and when the mood
became ‘LOSING IT’, this price could drop to AU$0.50 in real-time (WARC, 2018).
Snicker’s marketing objectives on social media was to unlock more audiences who
could be the potential customers in the future, and these audiences could give more
sales opportunities to Snickers. The marketing strategy that Snickers is to increase the
engagement and participation with customers and audiences on social media, while
there is an interesting pattern that the number of negative sentiment tweets on Twitter
with hashtag ‘#angrytweet’ is at peaks between mealtimes (WARC, 2018), that could
be the reason why Snickers Australia puts its advertisement and promotion into the
mood of social media users. The result of Snickers’ ‘Hungerithm’ campaign was
successful, the snickers price in 7/11 store nationwide was updated more than 140 times
a day, the price of chocolate bar was dropped to 82% off, also the social traffic for
Snickers increased 1470% with a 67% raised in sales during the campaign running
period (Digital Training Academy, 2017). The Snickers case study on digital marketing
shows the function of audiences on the perspective of psychology, marketing is mostly
relying on and referencing from the audience activities.

On the other perspective of audience research, fan studies with its culture and
communities could also reflect the audience functions. It always comes to the question
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that, what is fan and how can it be defined, there would be many examples of fan as an
individual or a community, like fan of a type of music, a drama, a sport, a book or a
celebrity, the word ‘fan’ itself contains an emotion of enthusiasm to other things. The
range of fan and fannish behavior is contributing the engagements between audiences
and media because being a fan is like get in part in a relationship, there would have
some meaningful connections and reciprocations from the supporting as a fan (Liz,
2016). Fans as members of fandom could be into forms of individual fan or fan
communities, this is a way of audience formation. Being a fan of something or someone
should be an enjoyable experience, but in fact, there are many negative opinions about
fan itself and fan behavior, which is the fan stereotype, the fan stereotype began with
the phenomenon of extremism and psycho-pathology behavior in fandom (Sullivan,
2013, p. 193). However, for analyzing the characteristics of fan in audience research,
Fan communities in South Korean media industry are the best environment to discover
the fan behavior, psychology, and stereotype in order to show the function of audiences.

Along with the increasing popularity in South Korean media and idol industry, the
Korean pop fan communities with its unique systems for Korean idols is growing in
fast speed and well-developed in last 20 years, the fans of Korean idols play the huge
role to expand the broader range of audience into K-pop culture. Korea idols have
different treatment to fans other than the western celebrities, K-pop idols contribute
more interactions to fans than western celebrities, they hold events like fan meetings,
fan signs, and live concerts regularly, audiences as fans have the rights to decide the
directions of idols. A unique fan system in Korean is called ‘fan café’, fan café is a
digital platform or forum of the fan club where a fan could communicate and interact
with idols, this platform is both able to access on desktop and mobile phone, the most
used website and software for fan café is DAUM. If audiences of an idol group or an
individual idol are willing to join the fan café, there is no requirement to join, but some
sections such as the posts and chats of idols are only accessible for the official fan café
member, and the requirement for becoming official is to pay a certain amount of money.
Fan café gives lots of authorities to fans, for example, they could decide the fan club
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name by voting the given names from idols’ company. It is possible to state that ‘fans
are god’ for celebrities, not only idols in South Korea, worldwide celebrities need their
own group of audience, it is their jobs to explore the audience preference and make
them satisfy, because they are earning money from the fans or audiences from sales of
albums, concert or fan meeting. As K-pop industry strongly relying on the fans and
audiences, there was a big TV program project from Korean entertainment
conglomerate CJ E&M, the program is about a reality talent competition which name
Produce 101. In this program, there are 101 competitors, every competitor is being
ranking based on the amount of voting by audiences, and there are only 11 members
can debut as K-pop boy or girl group. There are no judges in the program, it is 100%
based on the audience participation to make the decisions of final members, which
means audiences are functioning as the ‘producer’ for the K-pop group by voting their
favorite competitors on the internet and social media platforms. Produce 101 has
already broadcasted 4 seasons, season 2 achieved the highest voting number from the
high audience participation, total 1,57,837 voting was accumulated by the first rank
competitor- Daniel Kang (Jeong, 2017). The reason why this project could be
successful is that it utilized fan psychology and behavior to make them get in part of
the fannish engagement, and this shows the entire function of fans as audiences that
“fans stand to tell us a great deal about audiences as whole” (Kristina & Jonathan, 2011,
p.426).

In conclusion, the function of media audiences in the digital media landscape is

different from a different perspective. In the case of digital marketing, audiences
become the current and potential customer, and they are also the marketing strategies
driver such as the ‘Hungerithm’ campaign of Snickers. On the other hand, fans also
play a big role as audiences to celebrities, for instance, audiences as ‘producer’ and
decision maker for the future directions to K-pop idols.

(Word Count: 1830)

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References
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Nightingale, V. (1996) Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real. London and New
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