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Because presentation aids become part of the message you are sharing with listeners, your analysis of your audience should drive your aid selection. When choosing appropriate aids, be sure to consider audience demographics and listeners’ prior exposure. Ask yourself, “Of all the possible aids for this speech, which one or which combination would work best with this audience?”

Demographics. Think about the demographics of your audience. Demographics—such as listeners’ age, gender, and place of birth—can easily predetermine audience members’ response to a particular audio or visual aid.

For example, a student named Anna is giving a presentation on costume design in film. The main point of her speech is that on-screen, clothing plays an important role in defining a character. As she speaks, she clicks through images from films in which costume designers’ carefully chosen contemporary clothing offered the films’ audiences insights into characters’ personalities and experiences. In presenting this speech to a class of traditional-aged college students, Anna might include images of Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in the 2012 film Silver Linings Playbook. But what if Anna were presenting her speech to an audience consisting mainly of people in their forties and fifties? She might make the same points and present all the same evidence but instead choose images of characters from earlier films, such as Annie Hall (1977) or Do the Right Thing (1989).

Prior Exposure. As noted in chapter 5, prior exposure to certain elements of your speech may positively or negatively influence your audience’s response to those elements. This can be true of presentation aids as well. Consider Crystal, a student who gave a persuasive speech opposing abortion. She knew from interviews that many of her listeners identified themselves as pro-choice. Therefore, she avoided using graphic photos or images of abortion procedures, which these audience members had probably seen many times before and would likely find offensive. Instead, Crystal chose visual aids to make her argument that all life has value, including pictures of healthy infants and the children and young adults they grew up to be. Although she may not have persuaded all her listeners to change their viewpoints on abortion, her speech proved thought provoking and held her audience’s attention.

How can you determine whether your audience has had prior exposure to the presentation aids you’re considering—and what that exposure implies? Ask the same kinds of questions we introduced in chapter 5: