How do media professionals know the audience?

There are a few ways in which media professionals are able to gauge their audience's interest and response to their media. While much feedback can come from ratings, sales figures and e-mails from viewers, there are other ways that media professionals get to know their audience. One way to do so is Hall's encoding and decoding model. In his model it says that in order to understand we must look at the production and reception of media messages. His model focuses more on the communicative exchange within economic, historical, and cultural contexts. So to really find out why a media message would work or fail, you would examine the way in which the message was made and then how the members of the audience decoded it. He says that the audience has the option to either accept, adapt or reject the message. He then goes on to explain that there are four main codes that are used by media professionals and audiences;dominant code, professional code, negotiated code and the oppositional code. The dominant code, or hegemonic refers to when a member interprets a message in the context with the preferred meaning. The professional code, for example, is the way in which professionals code meaning within their messages. The negotiated code can best be explained as the member may accept certain pieces of a message, however based on their own experiences and knowledge ultimately reject the full intended meaning. The oppositional code is when the member just rejects the entire message all together.
Another way in which media professionals know their audiences is through the research of media professionals in terms of constraints, and work practices. In this approach, one is focused more on the agency of media professionals and tries to discover how the organization can have effects on the media. Also included, researchers can almost work backwards, starting with the finished result and tracing that back to what may have formed and created it. Some of the constraints to what might have formed the media is ownership of the organization, laws and regulations and advertising from sponsors.
Production research is basically aimed at the production and the professionals. There are four main theories that are concerned with this approach. The first is the political economy approach which deals with how the production is effected by powerful politics and the economy in general. The second is the critical theory where professionals engage in production in accordance to the ruling class. The third is the liberal perspective, where it says that professionals are not acting in accordance to the ruling class and they do now have to. The last is the feminist perspective, where it focuses on how females have coped with working in an industry which was predominately male.