The borderless online world and its digital structural opportunities create an unprecedented number of new ways of researching and reaching young audiences with the new content. Yet, despite this democratization, the opportunities are not equal for everyone within the global distribution sector. While commercial streaming services and studios in many ways benefit from the technological shifts, the small, independent distributors of children’s content
are more reluctant to experiment with new business models because they can rarely afford it. As a result, many of their potential young audiences remain unanticipated and unaware of the distribution of content that may be
interested in. How can the communication between distributors of independently produced youth content and the target audience niches still be improved in the digital era? Audience design (AD) is one of the methods that some European independent producers and distributors have experimented with to reach more young audiences.
This paper will analyze and discuss this method focusing on the case study of the Danish documentary youth series Efterskolen (2021) produced by an independent Danish production company with the support from DR3 and
the Danish Film Institute’s newly established audience-development funding scheme. Conceptually, audience design relies on the Design Thinking Principles translated into the word of independent distribution (Richter and Thiele 2018). It invites independent content-providers to explore holistically the potential audience clusters on different levels – cognitive, emotional, philosophical, political, psychological and sociological – and convert the discovered insights into specific audience-engaging actions that can connect the right story with the right audience. These audience-engaging actions are reminiscent of Alan Bell’s sociolinguistic models which recommend how a speaker can adapt their language so that their message has higher chances to grab the attention of the targeted addressees (Bell 1984). The implementation of such actions, though, requires additional expertise and financing that most of independent productions cannot afford and therefore, the implementation data is still limited. This paper offers a critical reflection on the AD-method based on the observation of the Efterskolen’s creative team’s implementation of their AD-strategy over several months. The participant observation notes will be coupled with the interviews with the creative team behind Efterskolen as well as several AD-consultants who work with audience design internationally. In this paper, I will discuss if the audience design method can create any added industrial, social, and professional impact of an independent youth program; if we can measure such an impact; and if the structural help from the public funding bodies is essential in making audience design method possible within the independent film&TV sector.