How do media professionals "Know" their audiences?

With the very wide range of new technologies, it's actually not that hard for media producers to know their target audiences, and also to make targets of their unknown audiences. With the rise of digital prominence, with the Internet, computers in general, digital cable, digital cellphones and things of that nature, in each of those products a record is kept deep within of your activity. In this record is logged every site you ever visit, every show you watch, every call you make (and from where and when), etc. When put together, or even viewed separately, these logs can paint a very clear and defined picture of you, and as you can imagine, this is very useful to the media producers.

What they can then do with this information is categorize you with others as certain types of audience members. Maybe it so happens that you only watch TV at night, and only a few shows on Comedy Central. Knowing this, they can make it so that to this target audience, only a certain type of commercial is played that works in tandem with both the time of day and the programming you usually subject yourself to. You leave behind a digital fingerprint wherever you go, and just like certain advertisements will pop up if you visit certain sites online, as these other fields become more and more open media producers, the same thing will happen there.

But there is a more open practice that media producers go through to identify your particular niche as well as your response to their texts. They can hold things like focus groups to discuss the feelings of an audience toward a certain TV show, commercial, event, etc. In this way they get first-hand access to your responses, and are allowed to see how these play out and are affected in a group-setting. Interviews are also a good method, if the subjects are too taboo for a group setting or they want more indepth responses. By using methods like these in unison with the logging methods more and more common today, media producers get a good idea of both who is receiving their texts and how they are being received.