In the television industry, demographics are used in various ways, most of which can be characterized as either descriptive or analytic. First, demographics can be used to describe an audience. Such descriptive uses may be applied to an actual audience (for example, 54 percent female, 62 percent white, average age of 44 years), or demographics may be used to describe a desired audience, as in “younger” or “high income.”

Second, demographics can be used to sort data about people for purposes of analytics. For example, data may be available from a study designed to assess people’s evaluations of an evening newscast anchor. Researchers may be interested in the average evaluation across the entire audience, in the evaluations of specific subgroups of people, or in differences between the evaluations of specific subgroups. For either of the latter two purposes, one would divide the data according to the demographic categories of interest and calculate averages within those categories. It would then be possible to report the evaluations of women as distinct from those for men, those for higher- and lower-education groups, and so on.

Advertisers’ interest in demographics arises from market research or advertising strategies that emphasize certain types of people as the target audience for their advertising. Therefore, commercial broadcasters, who earn their living by providing communication services to advertisers, are interested in demographics because the advertisers are. Because advertisers are more interested in some demographic categories than others, the commercial broadcasters have a financial interest in designing programming that appeals to people in those more desired demographic categories.

These interests result in programming artifacts, such as the low incidence of programs focused on African Americans or other racialized groups, on “neutral” constructions of matters such as religious belief, or on certain patterns of programming schedules, such as “sports on weekends when men are viewing.” The increased number of distribution channels that has emerged with greater capacity for cable programming, especially when multiplied by digital capabilities, has led to some more “targeted” programming and to some increased programming options for specific groups. Thus, more programming for children is now available than in earlier periods, and some networks, such as The WB or UPN, developed specific audiences with programs focused on African Americans. The increase in programming devoted to wrestling or NASCAR automobile racing, the success of Lifetime cable network’s focus on women’s topics, and Music Television’s (MTV’s) attention to “youth” markets can all also be linked to programmers’ reliance on demographic analysis.

Independent of the specific advertising connection, demographic categories may also be used whenever generalizations are more important than precision. National television programmers must think in terms of audiences of several million people at a time, so their work is characterized by reliance on such generalizations as women like romance, men like action, and young people will not watch unless we titillate them. For other media, such as radio, magazines, cable television, and the Internet, audiences are smaller, and more information may be available about them. Yet the convenience as well as the established habit of thinking in terms of demographic generalizations continues to hold sway.

Uses of demographics to define and generalize about people is an instance of social category thinking. The rationale is that the available social categories, such as age, gender, ethnicity, and educational level, are associated with typical structures of opportunity and experience that in turn produce typical patterns of disposition, attitudes, interests, behaviors, and so on. The application of social category thinking often extends beyond that sensible rationale to include any instance where differences in a variable of interests can be associated with conveniently measured demographic differences. Age, for example, is easy to measure, amenable to being categorized, and associated with a great variety of differences in tastes and activities. No one, of course, supposes that aging causes people to watch more television, bit older adults do watch more than younger adults. The convenience of that knowledge outweighs the need for precision in the television industry.