Analysis: Assumptions about audiences

In the article from Marketing Daily, Marketing to Single Women, Adreienne W Fawcett discusses the common misconceptions that marketers have about single women. She compares information from a Draft FCB survey of 500 advertising and marketing professionals in the U.S. to recent statistics. The conclusion that I have drawn from her observations is that marketers have just been stereotyping single women and don't bother to do the proper research that they would do for any other audience.

According to Fawcett's report, "marketing execs think single women are less educated, more adventuresome and richer than statistics indicate. They also are off the mark on the ethnicity of this market."

This makes me question, where do people in this industry get their audience information from? Is it all bullshit?

The other article I read with Portrait of the New Media Consumer by Peter Lauria. The article discusses the new consumer, 18 to 35 year olds who are media multitaskers, working on the computer doing research while texting on their phone and having the TV on in the background. I am that "media multitaker". I can be on the computer IMing, working on a paper, listening to music or a podcast, and talking on the phone.

Lauria sites two specific studies in his article, one done by Ball State University on "concurrent media exposure" and a Kaiser Family Foundation study on media multitasking among American youth. An interesting bit from the Ball State University is that most of the study's respondents "have been so exposed to media and are so adept at processing it that they didn't even realize how frequesntly then engage in concurrent mediea use." The study also found that 18 to 24 years olds spend more minutes a day interacting with media then any other group.