“Target Audience Profiles” was a project about establishing personas as audience profiles for advertising campaigns. The campaign was for The Adoption Exchange. When it comes to personas, Pruitt and Aldin state that “designers may be better able to infer what a real person might need” (Pruitt and Aldin, 2010). This included describing the characteristics of personas and listing the needs of the defined personas. A target audience profile (persona) is a fictional character created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic. These profiles (personas) are effective tools to use when considering the goals, desires, and limitations of the desired target audience. Creating a persona creates a human of theoretical data about customers who are considered to be the target audience. This project directly stated to prevent “self-referential design,” which is using personal preferences in the design process. 

Fortuitously, three profiles were created by including personal characteristics and with personal experiences of different families who want to adopt. By breaking this rule, using self-referential design helped develop an entirely new set of personas by connecting personal preferences with the target audience. Along with some personal characteristics and experiences, some personal desires to adopt in the future were considered in synthesizing someone who wants to adopt. Researching statistics helped defined the everyday status of people who adopt. According to Statistic Brain Research Institute (2017), married couples represent most at 70.2% of people that adopt next to Single Women/Females at 22.7%. The target audience reflects these statistics of married couples and single women. Using those top two statistics and adding personal characteristics, have helped bring the personas to life using sensory details. Imagery also helped bring the personas to life by transforming simple stock photos into stories of everyday life people. This process personally helped stretch the imagination, connect and understand the needs of the target audience, and be creative for advertising copy.

Pruitt, J. and Aldin, T. (2010). The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. San Francisco, CA. Morgan Kaufmann Publications. Retrieved from http://ce.safaribooksonline.com/book/strategy-business-planning/9780125662512