Understanding Your Target Audience and How to Reach It
Almost every brief we read has a section called "target audience." It usually reads something like this: women 25 to 44, suburban, household income above a certain number, values family and convenience. The standard advice is to study that group, break it into segments by age, place and values, and give each one a story that looks like their own life. An earlier version of this post said exactly that.
We've changed our minds. That advice assumes people need to see their own lives on screen before they'll care. They don't. People take in stories in remarkably similar ways, and the films that last are built on what's true for everyone.
Why the standard advice falls short
Segments have their uses, mostly in deciding where a film will play. They don't help much when you sit down to decide what the film says. Underneath every segment in a brief is something any person would understand, and that's the part worth filming. Here's what we mean:
| The brief says | What's true for anyone |
|---|---|
| Women 25 to 44 in Maricopa County | Wanting to do right by your kids |
| Fans aged 18 to 34 | Waiting all year for one night that feels like yours |
| Decision makers at mid-size firms | Not wanting to be the one who got it wrong |
A film about the first column reaches the people in it, if you're lucky. A film about the second column reaches anyone, including the people in the first.
Good films pull brains into step
Neuroscientist Uri Hasson and his colleagues put viewers in an fMRI scanner and played them half an hour of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In their 2004 study, more than 29% of the cortex responded in sync from one viewer to the next, a "surprising tendency of individual brains to 'tick collectively'," in the authors' words.
In a 2008 follow-up, they compared clips from very different films. The more carefully a film was made, the more alike people's brains responded:
Share of the cortex responding in sync across viewers (over 65% for the Hitchcock episode, under 5% for the park footage). Source: Hasson et al., 2008.
The viewers were college students, and the researchers are careful to say a film's effect will vary from group to group. But look at what changed between the clips. It wasn't whether the subject matched anyone's life. A Hitchcock episode about a boy with a loaded gun is nobody's life, and it pulled people into step anyway. A real concert in a real park, filmed without any storytelling, barely moved them at all. The difference was the craft.
Nobody has lived on Arrakis
Dune came out in 1965. It's set on a desert planet thousands of years from now, among noble houses, spice and giant sandworms, and nobody who's read it has lived a day of that life (though a Phoenix summer comes close). It has still sold nearly 20 million copies in dozens of languages, because it's about things everyone understands: losing a father, fearing what you might become, loyalty, power and belonging. The films travel the same way:
60% of Dune: Part Two's $715 million at the box office came from outside the US and Canada, according to Box Office Mojo.
A story about a desert planet crosses every border because the people in it feel like people.
What this looks like in our films
For the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona's WIC program, our research (we call it a SITREP) found that many tribal members connected WIC with government surveillance. The barrier was trust, not awareness. That finding was particular to one community's history. The film rests on something any parent understands: wanting to do right by your kids, and hearing about it from another mother instead of from an institution. Here's the film:
Our Decadence aftermovies for Relentless Beats work the same way, and Relentless Beats has trusted us with them for years. Not everyone has danced through New Year's Eve at Phoenix Raceway, but almost everyone has had a night they waited all year for. We cut the film around that feeling, so it lands with people who were there and people who weren't. This is the 2025 aftermovie:
Timeless is the safe bet
The standard advice feels safe because it's tidy: pick a segment, make something that looks like their life and follow whatever is working this year. It's actually the risky way to spend money on a film. Trends date fast, a film made for one segment only works on that segment, and the next brief starts from scratch. A film built on something true about people keeps working for anyone who sees it, for years. That makes timeless art the responsible choice, not the indulgent one.
Where to start
If you're writing a brief this week, keep the section on who it's for, and add one line under it: what's true about this story for anyone? If you can answer that, you have the start of a film worth making. If you'd like help finding it, write to us.
Sources
- Hasson et al.: Intersubject synchronization of cortical activity during natural vision (2004)
- Hasson et al.: Neurocinematics, the neuroscience of film (2008)
- Herbert estate: Frank Herbert
- Box Office Mojo: Dune: Part Two
Cover photo: Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash.
