Where to Find Your Audience

Media consumption is the most rapidly shifting behavioral domain. The platforms people use, the content formats they prefer, and their receptivity to advertising all change year-to-year in ways that make historical data unreliable. A model trained on 2022 social media data will mischaracterize younger audiences by 2025.

PreFlight rebuilds media distributions annually from fresh survey data. Social media usage patterns come from large-scale surveys tracking platform adoption across demographic segments.¹ Streaming behavior, podcast listening, and news consumption are calibrated against annual industry research²³ that captures how quickly these habits evolve.

The relationship between personality and media behavior is well-established in the research literature. A meta-analysis of Big Five traits and social media use⁴ found that extraversion and neuroticism both predict heavier social media engagement, but through different mechanisms and on different platforms. Gaming behavior is linked to specific personality profiles⁵ in ways that standard demographic targeting completely misses.

Knowing which platform someone uses is only half the picture. You also need to know how they respond to the content they encounter there. Ad receptivity, influencer trust, social proof sensitivity, and review engagement all vary across audiences in predictable, researchable ways.

Influencer trust varies enormously by age and personality.⁶⁷ Ad receptivity is shaped by personality traits and media consumption patterns.⁸ Consumer review behavior follows patterns that are predictable once you understand the underlying psychology of social proof and conscientiousness.⁹

PreFlight models these receptivity traits as functions of upstream personality and demographic factors. A highly agreeable, high-social-proof audience will engage with influencer marketing in a fundamentally different way than a skeptical, high-conscientiousness audience. All of these behaviors emerge from the same underlying psychology, and the model reflects that.

The practical value of media modeling is channel strategy. If you know that your target audience over-indexes on podcast consumption but under-indexes on traditional social media, that changes where you spend your budget. If you know they have low ad receptivity but high review engagement, that changes the type of content you create.

PreFlight draws on research from news consumption studies,¹⁰ digital media reports,¹¹ and industry surveys covering streaming, gaming, and platform usage.¹²¹³ The modeling connects these channel preferences to the personality and demographic traits of each audience, so you can see which channels reach your audience and why those channels work for people with their particular psychological profile.