Primary and Secondary Audiences

Overview

Primary audience members are those directly affected by and who have a specific interest in what is being communicated visually or orally. The primary audience is sometimes referred to as the target audience. The secondary audience is made up of those indirectly affected but who have interests of varying intensity in the subject. The secondary audience may include decision-makers who have the means to affect changes in the lives or situation experienced by the primary audience. Scholars identify the hidden or tertiary audience as those who gain access to information but who exhibit only relational, casual, or limited interest.

Email is often used to explain the differences between primary, secondary, and hidden audiences. The primary audience is the individual(s) to whom the email is addressed; the secondary audience is anyone copied in the email; and the hidden audience is anyone who is told about the email. In many instances, the secondary audience includes decision-makers. One example of this function concerns the distribution of information on breast cancer. The primary audience is made up of women with breast cancer and all women who might potentially develop the disease. The secondary audience is made up of decision-makers such as cancer experts, the healthcare community, and foundations and donors who finance breast cancer research. The hidden audience is composed of family members, friends, employers, coworkers, and others who have ties to women affected by breast cancer.

Scholars have found that secondary audiences may need more detail about an issue than primary audience members already involved in the subject. However, some members of the secondary audience may need less detail because they are experts in the relevant field. Some experts suggest that a major element in deciding how much information to share with the secondary audience is the availability of other information on the subject. With a unique issue, more detail is needed than with a general issue that is already widely understood.

When communicating with others through either the written or spoken word, it is essential that communicators understand their audiences. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was one of the first communicators to understand this fact, developing a model of communication that focused on the speaker, the speech, the occasion, the audience, and the effect. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford identified those who will potentially read or hear material as the addressed audience and those who influence the speaker’s or writer’s development of ideas as the invoked audience. They suggest that the ultimate goal of the communicator is to persuade the primary audience, which is made up of individuals who are intended to directly respond to the speaker or writer, while providing information to members of the secondary audience who may be expected to use the information to engage in some present or future action. Communication experts have developed models of audience analysis for use in determining the most effective ways to reach audiences. These analyses may consist of learning what a primary audience member already knows, acknowledging what the communicator expects the audience member to learn from the communication, and identifying the best methods for delivering information to the proper audience.

Advertising has long been a field closely associated with determinations of primary and secondary audiences. Catherine Canavan and Pamela Walker Laird contend that this connection can be traced back for centuries, noting that archaeologists have uncovered signs painted on bridges in ancient Rome and Pompeii. In the Middle Ages, such signs included those hung by shopkeepers who displayed the symbols of their trades and street peddlers who used signs made up of chants, rhymes, and humor. In more recent times, medicine men drove brightly painted carriages advertising patented medicines that promised to cure all ills, Newspapers and radio ushered in a period of ubiquitous advertising that includes billboards, television, the internet, and a plethora of electronic devices.

Each medium is particularly concerned with identifying the primary audience for its advertisers. Before 1880, most businesses were owned by individuals or families, but a seismic shift occurred between 1880 and the 1920s with the rise of large corporations and stiff competition. By 1929, the two hundred largest corporations in the United States owned 48 percent of all corporate assets. Canavan and Laird suggest that by 1900, advertisers had begun to influence the purchasing habits of Americans. The National Biscuit Company (NABISCO) was one of the first companies to hire an advertising company to promote its products, hiring N. W. Ayers to increase sales of its newly improved cracker. That campaign was one of the first instances in which advertisers attempted to analyze and identify a primary audience.

Communication teachers may teach the concepts of primary and secondary audiences through classroom exercises, In an exercise that he labels “The Wreck,” Karl Smart of Brigham Young University divides classes into groups of four or five students and presents them with a scenario in which each role-plays as a sales representative for a mid-sized company who is sent to pick up an important client and transport him to a dinner at a fancy restaurant. The employee is driving the boss’s car and is running late. Because of a light rain and poor brakes, the employee, who is driving fifty miles per hour in a thirty-five-mph zone, manages to come to a complete stop at a stop sign only after traveling ten feet into the intersection. After the employee decides the best course is to continue through the intersection, another driver slams into the car, seriously damaging a door of the boss’s vehicle. Each group is given ten minutes to describe the event to a different audience consisting of either the client, who has been in three accidents already; a supportive team leader working with the employee on the relevant project; a coworker who has close ties to the boss; the boss; or the employee’s insurance agent and lawyer.

The students are instructed to consider what information each audience wants to know, what the particular audience needs to know, what the audience thinks about the employee’s work, why the audience is listening to the employee, how the audience is expected to react, and how the reaction of a particular audience will affect the employee’s career. The ultimate goals of the assignment are for the groups to be able to win the sympathy of the client in order to make the sale, to strengthen existing ties with the team leader, to diffuse a potential problem with the jealous coworker with ties to the boss, to emphasize the progress being made while downplaying the damage to the car when talking to the boss, to provide explanatory factors and minimize responsibility with the insurance agent, and to provide details and explain extenuating circumstances to the lawyer.

Applications

In 1964, the paper “How Much Do Readers Read,” written by Lester E. Krueger, won the Thomson Gold Medal. Writing about the problem faced by writers when determining primary and secondary audiences, Krueger won the award for the best handling of a stated problem by using a research design developed by Alfred Politiz in the mid-twentieth century. Krueger identified primary readers as those who express the most interest in a publication by purchasing it, and secondary audiences as those who did not have enough interest in a publication to purchase it but were interested enough to read it. The “passalong” audience was made up of individuals who read the publication simply because it was accessible in the home. Tertiary readers were those living outside the household who gained access through the in-home audience. Krueger measured the intensity of each audience by how much a publication was read. His study revealed that all three groups of in-home readers spent more time reading a publication than the hidden (tertiary) audience, and primary audiences spent more time reading it than all others. Gender differences of audiences were found to be related to whether a publication was intended for female or general audiences.

The advertising and marketing industries have laid much of the groundwork for analysis of primary and secondary audiences, determining where resources should be allocated and how resources are best employed to reach specific goals. Nedra Kline Weinreich maintains that small companies may not be able to achieve both goals simultaneously. Large companies may engage in market segmentation, identifying buying habits, demographics, and leisure activities that help advertisers plan ad campaigns. For example, in a segmentation project designed to identify primary and secondary audiences for lifestyle products, Porter/Novelli identified possible primary audiences as “active attractives,” who tended to be young, vain, and focused on looking attractive, and “physical fanatics,” who were middle-aged and older adults focused on health and fitness. The secondary audience was recognized as having the potential to exert possible influence on primary audience members.

Identifying audiences is also a primary function of organizations that provide healthcare information to ensure that information reaches the proper audience. In a rehydration program in developing countries, for instance, the primary target consists of mothers and caretakers of children from birth to four years and the community of leaders, teachers, and elders who disperse information. The secondary audience is composed of doctors, supervisors, health care facility staff, and community health workers involved in making decisions and providing funds to get the information out to mothers and caretakers that rehydration can save children’s lives. The hidden audience includes all others who are affected or who are interested in the issue of rehydration, including politicians and members of the media.

In another example, the New South Wales Cancer Institute launched the “Wes Bunny Testimonial” to teach Australian teens about the link between suntanning and skin cancer. Wes Bunny was an outdoorsman who died of melanoma at the age of twenty-six. The primary audience was the 18–24-year-old age group most likely to be suntanned. The secondary audience was the 13–17-year-old age group who were somewhat interested in suntanning and who would shortly become part of the primary audience. The hidden audience was others who might be affected by a family member or friend contracting skin cancer.

Issues

As a field that has traditionally been engaged in precipitating social change, documentary photograph can employ visual storytelling to examine issues of social inequality, create iconic images that continue to convey messages since they stay in the mind, and educate and motivate those who have the power to effect change. A classic example of the power of documentary photograph to focus broad attention on the plight of a particular group is the series of photographs taken by Wendy Ewald and the children of Appalachia and published as Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians (1985).

Documentary photography also provides clear evidence for identifying primary and secondary audiences. While serving as the scholar-in-residence at Portland State University in the Art and Social Practice Program, Gemma-Rose Turnbull worked with the children at a local school on the King School Portrait Project. Participants were children between the ages of six and fourteen involved in an afterschool program. They were given the opportunity to tell their own stories in Turnbull’s documentary photography project. The primary audience included project participants, collaborators, and producers, and the secondary audience included the general public, the art world, art critics, and others who exercised economic, political, and social power.

Turnbull suggests that socially engaged art allows the artist to use aesthetics, ethics, collaboration, and personal media strategies to engage in social activism. Although the primary audience is made up of project participants who are directly affected by the project, the ultimate goal is to reach the indirectly affected secondary audience in order to ensure that change occurs. Upon viewing the photographs in Turnbull’s project, students posted their reactions on yellow-post-it notes, and these photographs and their comments became part of the project. In one photograph, for instance, a young African American girl stands tall before the camera. Her reaction to the photograph is that her hair is “messed up.” Others posted comments describing her as “proud” and “brave.” Another young girl tells her story of a painful childhood in India and how sad that life made her. Turnbull believes that the project allowed her to bridge the gap between her primary and secondary audience when the material was printed in book form and sold at the Shine a Light event held at the Portland Art Museum in collaboration with the Art and Social Practice MFA Program of Portland State University. Turnbull used the children who were part of her primary audience to reach her secondary audience, with the children telling their stories to visitors who visited their exhibit.

Outside the world of documentary photography, experts have struggled to identify the primary audience for art works. Some say that artists create works with a public audience in mind, even though they are endeavoring to express themselves out of individual motives. Others suggest that the purpose of art is to make a statement by identifying the primary audience as the art world, made up of other artists and critics. Nick Zangwill insists that some artists do not have any audience in mind, citing the example of Franz Kafka who asked that The Castle (1926) and The Trial (1925) be destroyed upon his death. In many cultures, sculptors have created statues for the sole purpose of burying them with the dead. Other examples include poems written solely out of the need to write that are never shown to anyone else, working sketches used by artists before beginning a work, and early drafts that might be vastly different from an author’s completed work.

Some writers have been faced with the dilemma of being forced to write for a double audience, such as some African American authors who learned that books had to be geared to the White book-buying public even though they were written to tell the stories of Black people. A frequent target of claims that he wrote solely for a white audience was James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938). It has been suggested that Johnson himself was unsure whether his primary audience consisted of White readers, who had the power to effectuate change, or the Black community about whom he was writing. Even though he was the first African American to serve as executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was active in an anti-lynching campaign, Johnson was accused of sugar-coating his stories to ensure that White readers were not offended, to the point that his works failed to depict the actual experiences of Black Americans.

In a 1928 article entitled “Double Audience Makes Hard Road for Negro Authors,” Johnson responded to criticism by stating that, while writing to a double audience of both Black and White readers, Black writers who tried not to alienate Black middle-class readers ended up writing to a secondary audience of White readers for the purpose of promoting the interests of their primary audience of African Americans. Furthermore, Johnson suggested that Black writers of gritty urban material and earthy rural material could also be accused of playing to stereotypes.

Zora Neale Hurston, the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), was also accused of writing for a primary audience of White readers by Richard Wright, the author of Native Son (1940), who accused her of feeding into the stereotypes of African Americans with her humorous depiction of minstrel shows. Hurston fired back that she was limited by what publishers were willing to publish. In turn, James Baldwin suggested that Wright’s depiction of Bigger Thomas in Native Son was a descendant of Uncle Tom of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

Terms & Concepts

Anti-lynching Campaign: Between 1890 and the 1930s, the African American community fought to end the practice of lynching, which allowed White people, mostly in the South, to hang African Americans without benefit of trial. The NAACP made the campaign a major focus between 1909 and 1930.

Dehydration/Rehydration: Dehydration may occur as body fluids are lost as the result of illness, certain medications, and excessive exercise. In developing countries, where endemic diseases frequently result in vomiting and diarrhea, infants and young children die from dehydration when parents lack understanding about its prevention. International programs are dedicated to educating the public and dispensing rehydration kits that replace lost body fluids.

Documentary Photography: The term is used to describe the practice of using a camera to tell a story of a moment in time to convey a particular message. It is often used by social activists to call attention to individuals or groups needing help or situations that need to be changed. It is distinct from photojournalism, which focuses on news events and breaking stories.

Market Segmentation: Refers to the process of classifying potential members of a particular group according to shared characteristics, needs, and desires to identify primary and secondary audiences for advertising purposes.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: A civil rights organization founded in 1909 following a race riot in Springfield, Illinois. Of the sixty founders, seven were African American community leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church. The NAACP has been instrumental in bringing about social change, such as ending Jim Crow laws in the South and the integration of schools and public facilities.

Uncle Tom Stereotype: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stereotypical character introduced in Uncle Tom’s Cabin became so much a part of popular culture that African Americans derisively labeled members of the community who endeavored to please White people or who acted obsequiously as “Uncle Toms.”

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Turnbull, G.-R. (2015). Surface tension: Navigating socially engaged documentary photographic practices. NORDICOM Review, 36, 79–95. Retrieved March 16, 2019, from EBSCO Online Database Communication and Mass Media Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=102671026&site=ehost-live

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Zangwill, N. (1999). Art and audience. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57(3), 315–332. doi:10.2307/432197