4 Values-Distinct Audiences

Understanding people’s media habits gives us a deeper view into who they are, the values they hold, and how to engage them. Experience the cultural worlds of 4 U.S. audiences through the lens of the real-life media artifacts they engage with.

What's an Audience?

Our audiences center values and the media people actually experience.

Audience as Value NeighborsAudiences are groups of people defined by values—their goals and ideas about how the world works. We use a map of values, based on the work of social scientist Shalom Schwartz, where position matters. Tough Cookies are more like Don’t Tread on Me than If You Say So, since the core values of both audiences anchor protection. We also use media engagement habits and attitudes toward specific issues to further define our audiences. Demography offers an additional descriptive layer.
Audience and Media ConsumptionA group of people may share attitudes about an issue or demographic traits and yet occupy radically different cultural spaces in terms of the genres, platforms, voices, or stories they spend time on. Reaching them means understanding and adding value to their cultural milieu. We’ve found that values are the best predictor of cultural affinity. And, combined with survey, our behavioral media consumption data allow us to always refine our audience models.
Audience-forward StrategyAudiences can tell us to what extent people encounter an issue, narrative, or type of content, like disinformation, in their media intake. They can help us to better understand vulnerabilities, opportunities, and risks, and to form hypotheses for narrative intervention. So, by the time we’re ready to produce content, we know whom we should be speaking to, how, and where.
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Comparing Audiences

See how these 4 audiences compare with regard to their cultural consumption.

A word spider depicting top Youtube channels.
✊✊People Power
If You Say So 🙃🙃
💪️💪️Tough Cookies
Don't Tread on Me ⚡⚡
Bigger words in the chart are more common overall. Words that appear in the center of a quadrant 'belong' to that group. Words close to an axis are shared by two groups.

Choose an Audience to Learn More