We obviously know who`s listening: Commercial Radio Programming, Subjectivation and Coloniality in Bogotá, Colombia.

The targeting of specific populations by corporations, marketing and advertising agencies, media and even governments has become an obsession around the world. Demographic and psychographic profiles of target populations, developed by experts applying sophisticated statistics and other scientific tools, are frequently naturalized and used to organize production, consumption and people. What are the reasons for this contemporary trend? What are the connections between the targeting of social groups, identity and the power dynamics of our time? How on-target is targeting? How does media targeting operate in non-Western locations? My research project looks at all these questions and does two things: first, it develops a theoretical critical framework that explains how this obsession with targeting came into being in media, why it has become so widespread and what the relationship is between media targeting and subjectivation. Second, using empirical work, the thesis analyzes a particular case of media targeting: the production of targeted programming by some of the top rated commercial radio stations in Bogotá, Colombia, most of them featuring popular music. Interviews with the directors of the radio stations combined with an analysis of audio samples from each station, enabled a detailed description of their targeting and interpellation strategies. The thesis is a transdisciplinary research project that combines insights from critical Cultural Studies, Foucauldian theories of governmentality, post-Marxist and Latin American Decolonial theories, and the fields of Media Production and Popular Musicology. I conclude that media targeting is a governmental technology of subjectivation that co-opts difference and the cultural labor of people by systematically organizing them according to the hierarchies of Coloniality.