In the simplest terms, a Target Audience is the intended buyers of a particular product that the advertisement strives to reach.
A good 99.9999999999...9% of the products that see a wide commercial release have one primary function: to make money. But they are not released blindly without knowledge of who might buy it. Even as the product is still in the conceptual phase, the marketing division researches who might buy it and how best to reach them. This is split up into Demographics.
To give an example of something built with this in mind, the Target Audience of Hannah Montana is 8-12 year old girls. Towards that end, they created a relatable protagonist, put her in a setting that mirrors everyday life, and offered an escapist fantasy of being an average kid at day, pop idol at night. They reached their target audience through advertisements in magazines and websites popular amongst young girls, branding items they are likely to buy, and running TV ads for both the show and its merchandising during other programs popular with them across the Disney-owned channels. Disney has an extensive SOP for rolling out new tween stars, which includes a mandatory appearance on an established show to introduce the new character to the audience. Various shows in the 80s managed to make profit off the idea that if kids watch a show and like it, they're more likely to buy its merchandise.
A product having a Target Audience does not automatically mean it is Pandering to the Base, though. You know that artsy film that has all the critics speechless? It, too, has a Target Audience. Maybe the True Art audience isn't very big, but it was targeted, nonetheless. To that end, even the rare few products that weren't made with a specific audience in mind will have to target one to be a viable commercial release.
One thing is certain, though: if it's advertised, it has a Target Audience.
The opposite trope, Periphery Demographic, is when a work finds an audience of a variety it did not intend to appeal to. An Audience-Alienating Premise is one that either appeals to an extremely niche audience, or negates any Target Audience due to how the premise is constructed; however, it may still attract enough of a Periphery Demographic to make back its budget, through good PR and lots of luck. If a work fails to appeal to either its Target Audience or a Periphery Demographic, it becomes a case of Uncertain Audience. Super-Trope to Assuming the Audience's Age.
Examples:
Advertising
- Lonely Water was aimed at the 7 to 12-year-old age group in order to scare children into behaving sensibly when near water bodies whose depth was greater than their height.
Comic Books
- Chick Tracts: To appeal to wider audiences and make oft-oversought demographics feel welcome, the comics are redrawn to fit the race/ethnicity of the intended target audiences. The White American comics depict generic cartoon characters, while the comics aimed at Black Americans
draw all characters as black.
Films — Live-Action
- AlbaKiara was made for the Generation K of the 2000s, on top of being marketed for teenagers over 14. It doens't shy away from sex and drugs as a sort of cautionary tale for said generation.
- Child's Play (2019): All Buddi dolls are designed to look as human-looking as possible with the purpose of easing children's minds and appearing as just another friend to play with.
- Jurassic Park (1993): The titular theme park is aimed at appealing to children due to them loving dinosaurs. For that purpose, Hammond's grandchildren are sent to the island as a test audience.
- Oresama unabashedly caters to Miyavi fans.
- Thunderbolt Fantasy: The Sword of Life and Death: The Taiwanese audience were caught by surprise to actually witness the "Mealbox Slang" note being written in for the story and made its way to the Japanese dub. The other point was a cameo by Pili Series character Qi Tian Di.
Literature
- The Northern Caves: According to its author, Salby, the target demographic of Chesscourt series is people who share—or are at least amenable to—the philosophy of Mundum. The problem is that Mundum can hold quite the Orange-and-Blue Morality. The unintended effect is that the simple "morality" works great in the first installment, which is aimed at young children.
Live-Action TV
- Love Me Licia was made for a target demographic of Italian children who were huge anime fans in the 80's. As a result, the show is cutesy, idealistic, and lighthearted to glurgy extremes.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: In "The Dead Talk Back", Dr. Forrester invents pinpoint marketing, entire advertising campaigns targeted at and named after the single person they're trying to sell to. Nelson cigarettes ("For the spirit of Nelson in all of us!") fail to penetrate the market because spokesman Frank just woke up, and Mike doesn't like smoking, despite the 'Bots' attempts at peer pressure.
Music
- Melanie Martinez: Her concept albums CryBaby and K-12 center around Crybaby, a character stated to represent "a young girl going through adult things". As a result, music videos and song lyrics alike heavily feature twisted childhood themes in a pastel palette. This aesthetic is very appealing to teenage girls, especially those who feel like outcasts; something that has been acknowledged by Martínez herself in an interview, when asked what demography she thought her main listener base belonged to.
- Menudo: At the time of its creation, there were two markets for Spanish-language music: adults and young children. There was nothing out there for preteens and teens. That was the audience Menudo sought.
- Take That: 90s manager Nigel Martin-Smith first created the band to appeal to teenage girls and the gay audience. Nowadays the band has a much more widespread, generic appeal. Martin-Smith originally wanted to form a British answer to New Kids on the Block, but changed his mind and decided to go for a slightly older audience when he discovered Barlow first. The fact that Barlow wrote all of his own material was a huge plus, but at 20, he was much older than the singers that Martin-Smith was looking for in his original concept. As a result, he decided to market the group to both British teenagers who had just outgrown NKOTB and the LGBT audience.
Platforms
- Evercade: The console was made for retro-players who miss the 80s-90s era.
Puppet Shows
- Teletubbies: The titular characters behave like happy, energetic toddlers of about one or two years old because the show's target demographic is very young kids, from babies to toddlers.
Theatre
- Heathers: The Musical: To appeal to the local Peruvian demographic, Mucha M Producciones' interpretation of the musical doesn't translate 80s American slang literally, but peppers it with national slang. Hilariously, when Veronica is frustratedly channel-hopping after Heather Chandler's death, one of the news broadcasts interviewing Heather Duke on the matter gives her a distinctly selvática* accent.
Video Game
- Hypnospace Outlaw: Some of Merchantsoft's woes are caused by Adrian Merchant's attempt to push out the "geeks" that made Hypnospace successful and attract a more mainstream audience of teens, the elderly, and professionals.
Webcomics
- Buildingverse: Its target audience consists of women, mostly in their 20s, and the Fangirl (optionally simply geek or nerd) variety, not surprisingly. At least the author of GND joked about "When I grow up I want to draw shoujo manga." (some would argue that she already does or what she does is closer to josei actually).
Web Video
- The Dom Reviews: Refreshingly for a YouTube media critic, Dominic often takes these into account when reviewing media. If he is the target audience, he'll encourage people with similar tastes to give it a chance, or not, and if he's clearly not the work's intended audience, he'll try to be fair and encourage viewers to take his opinion with a grain of salt.
- Downbeat: The focus of "Wiggle Parade" is a musician who presumes that her target is adults with children being a periphery demographic, who doesn't seem to realize that it's the other way around.
- Paint: According to "Boy Brand", Backstreet Boys' current demographic is Your Mom: middle-aged housewives desperately trying to recapture the ardor of their youth by worshiping a group of aging has-beens.
Western Animation
- Winx Club: The show's first three seasons and movie finale are squarely directed at teenage women, as some of the themes are too dark for small children; e.g., being incapable of accepting one's parents' divorce, losing one's mother at a young age, suffering an identity crisis over one's late biological family, separation anxiety, and dealing with jealousy. There are, nonetheless, some cute factors (the diminutive Pixies and Kiko) and enough goofiness and many The Power of Friendship moments to lighten the atmosphere. Over time, however, the creators decided to shift the appeal toward younger and younger demographics so more toys would be sold. The fourth season and accompanied movie are notoriously more childish, making some characters regress in their development, but are still acceptably serious. From season five onward, the whole franchise has started to target preschoolers, delivering vapid, Anvilicious morals and preventing the girls from truly maturing (a big cue is that they are Alfea students again, despite having graduated many seasons ago).