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
- Oresama unabashedly caters to Miyavi fans.
- Thunderbolt Fantasy: The Sword of Life and Death: The Taiwanese audience were caught by surprise to actually witnessed 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.
Live-Action TV
- 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 feature twisted childhood themes and themes quite heavily 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.
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.
