Why on earth are you reading this? It’s a question that the more business-oriented of my colleagues in the creative sector will commend me for asking. This is where focus groups spring from. The best way to give the public what it wants, the reasoning goes, is to ask it what it wants. So: low taxes and a lavish welfare state.
Unfortunately most creative people don’t care about giving the public what it wants. They just want to create what they want and for the public to pay for it. The notion of a “target audience” is unhelpful. Apart from conjuring up the notion of the poor audience being bombarded with projectiles rather than having a bloody good time watching TV or going to the theatre, it misses the point that, in artistic or entertainment terms, most of us don’t know what we want until we’ve seen it. No one in the early 16th century was clamouring for a painting of a lady with a stunningly realistic, ambiguous expression on her face and yet the Mona Lisa has, in modern parlance, smashed it.
