ABOUT AUDIENCE DESIGN

Audience Design (AD) represents an innovative and transformative approach to the development of audience engagement strategies that has emerged as a response to the evolving challenges faced by independent and arthouse cinema in the contemporary media landscape.

It is one of the central characteristics of Audience Design (AD) that there are many different ways to practice it. The diversity of professional approaches among Audience Designers who are part of the Audience Design Collective exemplifies this variety: while an Audience Designer coming from a distribution background might practice it primarily as a creative distribution practice, another Audience Designer might approach it as a story development practice. 

This flexibility reflects AD’s adaptive nature, as practitioners bring their unique expertise and perspectives to bear on the fundamental challenge of creating meaningful connections between films and their audiences. Rather than prescribing a single methodology, AD functions as a framework that can be tailored to different professional contexts, project needs, and creative objectives. 

Developed in 2011 at TorinoFilmLab (TFL), one of Europe’s leading training and development labs for feature films, AD has established itself as a creative and collaborative film distribution practice that enables creative teams to explore their projects’ story, audience, and strategy through a structured yet flexible methodological framework – so there are many different was to practice it. 

The originators of the Audience Design programme at TFL, Valeria Richter and Lena Thiele, who served as Head of Studies during the programme’s formative years, articulated a comprehensive definition in their handbook “Audience Design: An Introduction” (2018). Here, they define Audience Design as “the process of creating audience awareness and engagement around films, from an early stage of development through a story-based and multi-angle approach.” 

The distinguishing characteristic of Audience Design lies in its story-based approach to audience engagement. This represents a fundamental departure from conventional marketing practices that often treat films as products to be sold rather than stories to be shared. AD positions the film’s story at the center of all strategic considerations, treating it not as a fixed entity but as something active, evolving, and capable of taking different forms across various contexts and platforms. Understanding the story in terms of its audience requires a distinctive analytical approach that differs significantly from purely aesthetic or critical analysis.