Audience

        The audience is a key consideration in producing a successful, or indeed exceptional, response to a brief. Knowing who you should be aiming your work at, where they go and what they are interested in is an invaluable tool in bringing your work to their attention and, ultimately, fulfilling what the brief requires of you.

        However, while the brief often gives a firm idea of who the client believes is the target audience, there may be other audiences you should be considering, For example, with the Save the Children campaign, the charity defines the audience as low income fathers, particularly those with children under 11. The audience should perhaps be the children themselves, as getting a child interested in reading with their dad is half the battle, as they can then bombard and pester him. The audience could also be the child's mother, who could again pass on the message to the father.

        Why might the mother or the child be a more suitable audience than the father? By targeting these alternate audiences, you could still fulfill the brief's aim to raise awareness of the Read On. Get On. campaign, but coming from his loved ones the message may have more of an emotional impact on the father than if it came from an advert (pull on his heartstrings).

• Who is the audience? (Intended)
• Who should the audience be? (Actual) 
• Who could the audience be? (Potential)

        So assuming that the children are a more likely audience than the dads, we need to know where they go, what they do, and what they want to be; anything that might aid us in communicating our message with them.

• What do they do? Go to school, play, pester, read, watch TV, go online, talk to friends, do homework.
• Where do they go? Home, school, extra curricular clubs, shops, public transport, cinema.
• What do they buy? Sweets, toys, books, comics.
• What do they want to be? Happy, popular, successful, make their parents proud?

        The key is to identify the main demographic and figure out how best to communicate with them and capture their attention. It is hard when a brief is trying to communicate with a broad demographic who have different wants and needs, for example you can't pigeon-hole all children, as they have so many different personalities and interests. Try to make the audience more specific; what kind of child or father do you need to address? What kind of lifestyle do they lead? What are their lives like?