Audience profiling is use of a range of techniques that can be used to classify audiences for the TV advertising industry. Audience profiling allows the researcher to find out about that particular audience before so you can be sure you will put your message or product to the right people in the most effective way in order to produce the best result.
This may include details like the audiences age, sex, educational qualifications they have achieved, work experience, field of work, orientation, religious background, health condition, etc.
Demographics
The most common and traditional method of audience profiling is known as demographics. Demographics is where the adult audience is defined largely by the work they do.
The NRS social grades are a whole system of demographic classification that is used in the United Kingdom. These were originally developed by the National Readership Survey used to classify readers, however are now used by many other different organisations for wider applications and have now become the standard for market research. They were developed and created over 50 years ago and achieved widespread usage in 20th Century Britain.
Below is the NRS social grades/classes
SOC (Standard Occupational Classification System) is the system that United Sates uses which is more detailed in classifying occupations. This system is used by U.S. federal government agencies that are collecting occupational data. It's created and designed to cover all occupations where work is preformed for a pay or profit, reflecting the current occupational structure in the U.S..
Below is the 2010 SOC (included 840 occupational types)
Psychographics
This is a way of describing the audience by researching their behavior and personality traits instead of just their social class. Psychographics label a specific type of person and then makes an assessment about their viewing and spending habits.
'Young an Rubican' is an advertising agency who invented a very successful psychograpic profile which is known as their 4C's marketing model which stands for Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation. They put the audience into different groups with labels that then suggest their position in society, as you can see below:
Geodemographics
Geodemography is known as the study of people based purely on where they live. Geodemographic systems try to estimate the most probable characteristics of people based around the bigger profile created of all people living in that small area, or near a particular address.
