Media: Codes, Conventions, Target Audience and Genre.

Target Audience
In advertising/marketing a target audience is a specific group of people within the target market, the target audience is important because it helps to sell the item you are promoting. Target audiences are put into catergories for example: Age group, gender and marital status. When marketing to your audience you have to become familiar with you target market, because otherwise your item won't sell.

For example:

• Old female teenagers to middle aged women like to buy fashion magazines because they like to keep up with the latest fashion and whats hot for each season, they would buy magazines like 'Vogue' and 'Glamour'.
• Young male adults upwards would buy magazines like sport because this is more interesting to males as they like to keep up with the latest transfer news and keep up-to-date with their favourite football team, they would buy magazines like sky sports magazine.

The reason why magazines attract different target audiences is because of the way they are presented to the reader e.g colour, the pictures they use (example: Vogue would use a famous model/actress and sky sports would use a famous footballer/athlete), size fonts and headings.

Genre
Genre is the term for any catergory of film, game and music. In the film industry genre refers to the similarities in which a film is constructed. Film genres can be catergorized in many ways, there usually catergorized by there setting, moods, theme topic and format etc. One more way they catergorize there films is by their target audience. It gives more variation. It also work the same in games and music. 
Examples:

• Film: Romance, sci-fi, action, thriller, western and comedy.
• Games: Action, adventure, racing and sport.
• Music: Rock, R n B, pop, classical, metal and musical.

Conventions
Conventions in genre means the specific setting, roles, events and values that define an individual genre. For example take the genre horror, in this genre you typically see a blonde hair girl and a murderer wearing a mask. Another example is sci-fi, in this genre you see spaceships and aliens.

Codes
Codes are used to show a way of conveying meaning to the audience. Codes are split into two catergories: Technical and symbolic. Technical codes are all ways in which the equipment is used to tell the story e.g: Camera work. Symbolic codes refer to the objects used in a film e.g: setting, body language, clothing and colour.