I’m My Audience; Therefor I know Audience

Those who know me, know that besides working an ad agency and freelancing on the side. I’m also a big nerd when it comes to school. I decided last year that I wanted back into the life of school and the many exciting opportunities it brings with it. Now stay with me as I show you how this segways into knowing your audience. I decide on taking a major but never knew what I wanted as a minor because of all the options and cool things I could learn. When it was all said and done I picked psychology.

I picked it because knowing who you are targeting and how to get into the head of the consumer through analyzing data and reading people is important in this business. I also picked it because I wanted to be a therapist as a child and this plays on that interest indirectly. I’ve been thinking about this and how much a smart choice this was for me, especially after reading and article on iMediaConnection over the weekend; Marketers vs. gamers: the real score revealed (click here to check it out). The article talked about trying to profile gamers and how we’ve never really done that as an industry. We’ve always just gone after the “hardcore” audience and never really looked at the other types of gamers out there at times.

“One of the challenges we have is that we can’t create a profile of a gamer,” says Johnson, a self-described member of the gaming community. “It’s a widely variant [group].”

Being a gamer, I think I’ve a very good handle on profiling a segment of the gaming population. However, we’ll need to keep better track of future trends outside of what the ESA does. In the end, knowing your audience helps but you’ll need to dig deeper and go further to reach more people. I think my minor in psychology will do just that.