Purpose of a Media Product

Every media product is made for a purpose: the reason it exists and what it is intended to achieve. A poster in a leisure centre reception might exist to fill places on a beginners' swimming course, while a podcast episode might exist to walk you through pitching a tent for the first time. Neither appeared by accident. Someone made each one to do a particular job with an audience, and that job is its purpose.

The five purposes

• Advertise/promote — drawing attention to a product, event, activity or cause so that people take an interest.
• Educate — developing someone's knowledge or skills through teaching.
• Entertain — giving the audience enjoyment.
• Inform — supplying clear facts and information about something.
• Influence — shaping what an audience thinks or how it behaves.

You need to recognise and name all five confidently, because a question may give you a product and expect you to pick out the purpose or purposes that fit it.

One main purpose, sometimes more

Most products have a single main purpose that everything else serves, with other purposes present in a smaller way. An audio guide at a castle mainly educates: visitors are meant to understand how the portcullis was raised and lowered. It can entertain as well, because plenty of visitors listen for the pleasure of it as much as for the facts. Asked for one purpose, you would still say educate — explaining the mechanism is why the guide was recorded.

Products with two strong purposes do exist, but one usually leads. A quick test is to ask what the maker would most want the product to achieve if it could only do one thing.