Hello and welcome to my easy to understand guide to have you heard about George's podcast and audience. This video is going to be particularly relevant for you if you are studying EDUCAS, A-level media studies, as it currently appears on that specification. The target audience for the podcast is quite young, quite diverse and quite educated.
And you can understand that when you look at some of the content of the podcast. The podcast include articles, stories, discussions about things like drama, art, poetry, culture. It's quite interesting and it's also quite high culture. You know, it's talking about... about things that we often think of as being a little bit more complicated, a little bit more hard to understand, which suggests the audience is reasonably intelligent.
Often we think of reasonably educated listeners talking about quite highbrow content as being older, but actually the target audience for this is a reasonably youthful and you know they try and engage those young audiences. They use kind of more modern language in some places, for example he uses quite a lot of like London street dialect and that's going to appeal potentially to a more young urban audience. It makes it more familiar and more accessible. He also discusses a lot of topics that are going to appeal to or be relatable to young, urban, modern audiences, particularly those from minority backgrounds. So for example in like the first couple of episodes he talks about the Grenfell Tower disaster.
And that particular kind of tower block in London, the fire that happened there affected a huge amount of minority people living in London. And so, you know, talking about particular topics. that might influence them or might be something that they can relate to.
He also discusses things like gang crime, he discusses things like drugs, discrimination, racism and so there's a lot of narratives within his podcasts that might have kind of identifiable or relatable elements to people from ethnic minority backgrounds. They won a Peabody award in 2019 and these awards are for people who make kind of more niche cultural programs that... are kind of supposed to be very high quality and that kind of award will bring in fans looking for something that is a quality program. George himself he has a history of being a kind of rapper singer he's done poetry before he's British he has a Ugandan background his parents were from Uganda and so this kind of adds to the fact that he's going to draw in those kind of young black British audiences he's going to bring in a male audience as well.
He is also quite wealthy, quite educated, and that's going to bring in those audiences who perhaps are a bit more educated themselves. And audiences may enjoy seeing or hearing somebody that challenges those typical stereotypes. We often see stereotypes in the media of young black men being less educated.
And so hearing someone that is clearly very educated, intelligent and interested in a huge range of cultural, political issues, perhaps it's going to engage audiences who don't. don't often see young black men represented in that way. He also uses a range of music on his podcast particularly from black singers so featuring music from artists like Stormzy, Solange. Jay-Z and so choosing the music for the podcast specifically to try and engage particular audiences. The podcast as a format makes it quite accessible for audiences, it's quite short, it's bite-sized, it reflects this trend for a lot of audiences now don't want to sit down and listen to the radio for example at a particular time, they want to have the choice of when and where to download or listen to content.
So having a podcast means that audiences can be quite flexible with how and where and when they listen. Having it be being flexibly available on things like BBC Sounds really helps to bring in that wider audience. Being that it's a podcast it means there's very little to no interactive content. You know a lot of like radio shows would do things like competitions or phone-ins and they can't do that with a podcast. What they do offer because they know a lot of people do like interactive content now is they offer that on their social media.
So for example on their social media forum they have a forum called Common Ground. where audiences can go online and find out more about the discussion topics that are going to be on the show or that were on the podcast previously and they can get involved in online discussions about those topics and they can also leave questions on that forum and on social media which then George and his team might then tackle in future episodes. Audiences can read other people's interpretations of the podcast, they can leave their own content and they can also like share their own content that's been inspired by the podcast. as well so that helps to engage those people who like to be a bit more active with their media products because this is produced by bbc radio 5 as a podcast radio 5 has a most ...over 40 years old, mostly male target audience and probably pretty much mostly, you know, reasonably high educated, high class, wealthy, predominantly white. And so this podcast is quite unusual, having a younger, more urban, more minority target audience.
it makes it quite unconventional in relation to the content that's actually on live on BBC Radio 5. And so perhaps this podcast is an attempt by the channel to kind of broaden or diversify their audience slightly. Don't forget, radio stations have to try. broaden and diversify their audiences and bring in younger audiences because if they don't bring in younger audiences as the years go by their audiences are going to keep dropping and dropping and dropping because less and less people are listening to live radio.
George often features guests in his podcast as well he often features his mum, he often brings in his brothers and that kind of gives it quite a family, quite relatable, guy next door kind of feel, makes him feel quite normal. He also features a lot of young young, black actors, singers, rappers, poets, artists. So, for example, in some of the episodes that I looked at online, there was Sophia Thakur, who is Indian, Gambian and Sri Lankan mix.
You've got Jade Alling, who is a kind of British mixed race actress, who's kind of most famous for being on CBeebies. You've got Henry Stone, who's a black... British poet.
So quite diverse representations of ethnicity and that again is to help bring in those kind of more minority audiences who often feel like they don't see themselves represented particularly within radio and podcasts. A lot of the hosts of radio and podcasts tend to be white so having these more diverse guests and presenters is going to help make the show feel more accessible for a lot of audiences. The show offers a wide variety of entertainment So for example, they talk to celebrities, they play music.
In episode 10, they have bedtime stories where they have clips from things like Aladdin, Rick and Morty, Space Jam, Knight Rider. So these intertextual references, these kind of references to other popular culture, that helps to target a more mainstream audience and bring those fans of those products in. And also if you think about things like referencing Knight Rider and Aladdin, that might suggest they've got an audience of quite a wide range. of ages you've got you know those products which were kind of quite popular in the kind of 80s and 90s and then you've got products they're referencing like Rick and Morty and the kind of more modern British rappers and poets So suggesting that the age range is quite broad, wide for this show, potentially sort of from anywhere from 20 to sort of 45. So that was my easy to understand guide to have you heard George's podcast and audience. Don't forget to check out my channel for other videos about that podcast and indeed other set texts that might be relevant for you.
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