Uncertainty is frequently described as a defining property of the creative media industries (e.g., Caves, 2000). The oft-quoted maxim by screenwriter William Goldman (1983: 39) that “nobody knows anything” in these industries encapsulates the persistent challenge of predicting audience reception and commercial and creative success. Consequently, many of the production processes are designed to mitigate uncertainty, particularly concerning qualifying the expected audience response. One key industry strategy is to use audience research – an umbrella term used here to encompass behavioural data, market insights and direct audience feedback – to inform production decisions. Ideally, this practice enables media producers and executives to rationalise decision-making about what content to develop and how, thereby reducing uncertainty (Napoli, 2008).
Although the predictive capacity of audience research has historically been contested (e.g., Caldwell, 2008; Gitlin, 1983; Havens, 2014; Ohmer, 2006), a lot of academic and industry attention is currently being directed at the data-driven production approaches of platforms such as Netflix that claim to harness millions of data points to tailor products to demand. This development has led some scholars to proclaim that “the days of the excuse ‘nobody knows’ […] are numbered” (Lotz, 2022: 88). However, there is limited empirical evidence to substantiate such claims, as the datafied approaches of streamers remain shrouded in corporate secrecy. While some scholars have analysed how screen workers encounter data when working for said streamers (e.g., Idiz, 2024; Navar-Gill, 2020; Rasmussen, 2024), questions about the specificities concerning what kind of data is employed, how it is used in creative processes, and whether it does in fact upend the “nobody knows” principle remain largely unanswered.
In this article I propose an alternate avenue, unbound by secrecy, for exploring how audience research feeds into production in the current data-intensive media environment. I present a qualitative case study of a new audience research practice entitled Audience Focus, institutionalised in the Danish film production culture by the Danish Film Institute (DFI). The novelty of the Audience Focus scheme is that it prompts filmmakers to consider and listen to their audience during the early script development stage of production. Previously, the Danish industry primarily relied on test screenings during post-production, in addition to desk research about audiences based on exposure data from previous films. Now, the filmmakers can test their ideas and screenplays much earlier, ideally affording them the chance to make changes according to the feedback before costs are sunk. From this locus, I investigate how smaller media industries with limited access to Big Data adapt to the global diffusion of data-driven logics in the highly competitive media landscape marked by uncertainty. I furthermore introduce the term creative uncertainty to account for the persistent challenges of translating audience data into concrete creative actions. This all serves to answer the following research question:
To what extent does the industry use of audience research to guide film production increase or reduce uncertainty during the creative process?
Before introducing the case study, the following two sections conceptualise uncertainty in creative media production and situate the role of audience research within this context.
In the cultural industries, uncertainty is inherent due to the work’s status as experience goods, the value of which can only be determined accurately once the finished work is experienced by audiences (Hesmondhalgh, 2018; Toynbee, 2006). Unlike other industries with steady consumer demand such as food, energy, or transportation, there is rarely preexisting demand for new cultural productions, and the market is often described as a “random component” (Faulkner & Anderson, 1987: 884) that is hard to forecast and control. Resultingly, management literature describes consumer demand as one of “the most pervasive risks facing creative industry entrepreneurs” (Dempster, 2006: 225), as is also indicated by the “nobody knows” principle. In turn, media production is marked by economic uncertainty based on the volatility of audiences’ demands and media use, which makes business particularly risky in audiovisual media production, where the process from ideation to finished product is long and entails a high level of irretrievable costs.
The literature from the fields of management and economy tends to link uncertainty to the “creative” nature of cultural production. For instance, Richard Caves has highlighted creative industries as inherently different from traditional industries, both because of the end product’s status as experience goods, but also due to the unpredictability of creative production processes. As an example, he cited the property of “infinite variety”, that is, the infinite universe of possibilities from which creative producers choose to generate novelty (Caves, 2000: 6), which holds that creative production cannot easily be standardised. Therefore, no two production processes or films are the same, unlike, for instance, industrialised car manufacturing. This makes both the process of production and audience demand for each new produced variation highly uncertain, contributing to the “nobody knows” property, according to Caves.
While Caves captured the economic uncertainties of cultural production, he has also been criticised for equating uncertainty and risk in the creative industries with their “creative” nature, without defining what he means by creativity (Andersen, 2022). This omission runs the risk of reducing creative processes to the naïve and mysterious notion of gifted artists following their creative instincts when selecting through the infinite universe of ideas. This line of criticism advocates that creativity is not necessarily mysterious but often a structured process that can be defined in multiple ways.
At its most basic level, creativity can be understood as the generation of new ideas that are considered useful in a given domain. Creative decision-making then refers to all the decisions leading to these new and useful ideas that make up the production output. These processes can look different depending on the contexts studied. In this study, I view the creative process as a distributed and sociocultural phenomenon shaped by collaboration between various actors. However, I also find it useful to view creativity through what Andersen (2022) has described as the pragmatic and artistic traditions of creativity. The first relates to how creativity can be stimulated by the introduction of design tools – such as, for instance, audience research measures, as is the case of this study. The second denotes how such practices can also challenge and control creative autonomy. As we shall see in the empirical studies, these creativity positions co-exist in the Danish film production culture.
For Andersen, creative processes are not inherently uncertain. Rather, he argued that industry practitioners can know quite a lot about their audiences, for instance, via audience research measures, but they are constrained by risk-reduction strategies due to the economic risks of production. Therefore, he proposed redubbing the “nobody knows” principle to “nobody dares”, as he found that it is the organisational and economic structures of cultural production that impose risk reduction in creative processes rather than a lack of knowledge about what works (Andersen, 2022: 35–37).
While it is true that industry practitioners spend a lot of resources accruing knowledge about audiences to determine what will work, this does not necessarily circumvent the “nobody knows” principle, as we shall see. Like Caves, I would argue that this has to do with the uncertain nature of creative decision-making. However, unlike Caves, I do not focus on the economic uncertainty derived from this. Rather, I focus on what I term creative uncertainty – that is, uncertainty in creative processes about how to best make films that will engage audiences, the industry, and the culture at large.
Creative uncertainty hails from the “infinite variety” property of creative production, as the manyfold decisions filmmakers can take to address a specific problem in the creative process enhances uncertainty about which ones will yield the best results. For filmmakers, creative uncertainty pertains distinctly to questions of how storytelling and stylistic devices will engage audiences. It involves basic uncertainties: Am I telling the story in the right way? Is my intended audience interested in my story? Will this scene provoke the intended emotional response?
As described by screenwriting scholar Margot Nash, these uncertainties are deeply embedded in the creative process. Resultingly, industry practitioners often embrace storytelling conventions to minimise creative uncertainty (Nash, 2013). They also often engage in collaborative problem-solving to counter uncertainty, as described in Eva Novrup Redvall’s study of screenwriting, which she described as a collaborative process of “problem finding” and “problem solving” with the goal being to “constantly learn more about what one wants to tell and the best way to tell it” (Redvall, 2009: 34). Where Redvall found that the filmmakers in her study rarely considered audiences when working to find the best ways to tell their stories, this study highlights how audience research and data is now being introduced at the early stage of production to provide an opportunity for minimising creative uncertainty by testing creative ideas, potentially enhancing storytelling and better engaging audiences.
Before proceeding to the findings, I provide a brief overview of how creative media industries work to manage uncertainty and audience research’s role in this endeavour.
In general, the film production process is structured around phases of development and financing, pre-production, principal photography, and post-production. These phases involve various gatekeepers, intermediaries, and collaborators who provide notes on the many different iterations that projects go through to steer them in the right direction (Caldwell, 2008). These structures serve to achieve aspects of certainty alongside risk reduction strategies such as sequels, prequels, franchising, genres, and stars that are used to align with proven audience preferences to increase certainty about audience interest while still creating something “optimally new” (Havens & Lotz, 2017; Pokorny et al., 2018: 24). Often these strategies are derived from so-called “industry lore”, that is, “common-sense ideas about what consumers want […] typically based more on perception and convention than research” (Havens & Lotz, 2017: 253). Yet, tacit knowledge has long been used in tandem with formalised audience research (Napoli, 2008; Ohmer, 2006). In combination, these measures serve to make the world of media workers knowable and manageable by enabling predictions about upcoming productions, potentially minimising uncertainty.
However, the function, effectiveness, and implications of audience research remain subjects of ongoing scholarly debate. Scholars such as Herbert Gans (1979), Todd Gitlin (1983), John Caldwell (2008, 2014), and Timothy Havens (2014) have argued that audience research does not necessarily yield more rational decision-making processes or increase the industries’ responsiveness to audience sensibilities. As Caldwell (2014: 153) stated, “executives frequently invoke hard numbers from research departments when useful but ignore them when the data contradict their personal hunches and intuition”. This quote illustrates that audience research often functions as a rhetorical device within broader industrial power dynamics, used to justify contested decisions in what Havens (2014: 8) terms the “complicated power plays among creators and gatekeepers that often deployed different conceptualizations of the audience”.
Given these tensions, some scholars claim that the use of audience research can indicate the degree to which organisations seek to “control the creativity” of individual workers (Hesmondhalgh, 2018: 330). As such, audience research has historically been met with resistance from creative practitioners who fear that it “may stifle innovation, risk-taking and diversity in the production of media content, and instead promote imitation, repetition, and homogenization” (Napoli, 2008: 31). This resistance is often tied to the long-presumed clash between creativity and commerce in the cultural industries. For instance, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1998: 27) links audience research to imposing “the sales model on cultural production”. Compounding these concerns is scepticism about the reliability of audience research as a predictive tool, since these measures are often based on analysis of past productions or pre-tests of upcoming productions based on small sample groups and tests of intermediary products (e.g., screenplays or rough cuts) that are not necessarily indicative of the film to be made (Napoli, 2008; Ohmer, 2006). As such, industry practitioners still experience uncertainty about how their films will be received, as we shall also see in the analysis.
To begin making sense of the empirical study, a brief introduction to the Danish film production culture is necessary. The industry is funded by a combination of national state subsidies with the Danish Film Institute (DFI) as the main funding body, international film funds, and private equity. Generally, almost all professional film productions in Denmark depend on funding from the DFI as the largest single source of finance.
The DFI funds films based on both artistic or cultural and market-oriented evaluation criteria, each split into separate production funding schemes: the Film Commissioner’s Scheme and the Market Scheme (although cultural resonance and market-orientation overlap at both schemes). A third production scheme, New Danish Screen, supports debut films with lower budgets. To obtain funding on New Danish Screen and the Film Commissioner’s Scheme, filmmakers engage in a lengthy development process with the DFI’s film commissioners, who provide notes throughout the script development process before greenlighting the film for funding. As such, the creative process is highly structured and sociocultural. On the Market Scheme, an assessment committee evaluates the projects based on quality, market prospects, and financing, with less extensive feedback.
The focus of this study is a supplementary audience research support scheme entitled Audience Focus [PublikumsFokus], where filmmakers can apply for funding for audience testing during their script development process. The scheme is open to both commercial and artistic productions. The audience research is conducted by external market research agencies, and the scheme is overseen by the DFI’s marketing consultants, who provide additional feedback related to audience prospects in tandem with the film commissioners’ feedback. It is voluntary to participate, and there are no official requirements that the audience research be used to make creative changes, although it is encouraged to use it as creative inspiration. However, the research feeds back to the film commissioners, meaning that the audience research process is not entirely separate from the creative conversations taking place when applying for production funding – the consequences of this for filmmakers’ autonomy are explored in a separate article (Freudendal, forthcoming).
The methods used for audience research at the DFI are largely qualitative. They include focus group interviews, in-depth interviews, and mobile ethnography. These test types rely on stimuli such as written or oral descriptions of selected scenes or dilemmas from the film, an outline of the screenplay, and specific themes in the film, which respondents are asked to provide feedback on. In some cases, quantitative semantic analysis of social media data relevant to the themes in a film was conducted. The qualitative measures rely on selective samples of 10–25 respondents per test, while the semantic analyses track as much as 155,000 conversations on social media.
These various data are then presented to the filmmaking team, as well as the consultants and commissioners at the DFI, by the external agency in a written report and an oral debriefing. The DFI considers the audience insights as “structured reflections” (Freudendal, 2023) and a way to make filmmakers engage more with audiences, shifting focus from filmmakers’ own opinion of why their story is relevant to how the story is perceived by audiences. Although the intermediaries conducting the research come from the world of market research for commercial enterprises, the goal of the audience research is not necessarily to reach larger audiences. Rather, the DFI presents it as a tool for improving the film and furthering engagement with the intended audience, whether it be niche or mainstream. Furthermore, the DFI argues that creative autonomy must be kept intact during this process.
Here, we see that the production culture’s view on creativity is understood both from the sociocultural creativity tradition of structured collaboration between producers and gatekeepers and the artistic tradition mentioned by Andersen (2022), where determinants outside the creative process – such as audience research – are seen as infringing on creativity. At the same time, the production culture has a pragmatic view of creativity, as something that can be stimulated by the introduction of a tool such as audience research. These different views of creativity in the production culture point to the dual mandates of the DFI: As a publicly subsidised institution, it must be of cultural relevance to the public to sustain legitimacy, yet the DFI’s role is also that of the aesthetic gatekeeper that evaluates which projects have the artistic quality to receive funding. As we shall see, these poles sometimes cause friction, as the DFI is, on the one hand, obligated to research and serve audiences, and on the other, intended to stimulate creativity and artistry independent of audiences. Concretely, this means that audience research is optional and that, from the perspective of the DFI, it should not influence funding decisions or control the creative process.
This article presents a qualitative case study of the use of audience research in creative processes centred around the DFI’s Audience Focus scheme. An embedded case study design (Yin, 2003) is used, in which the Audience Focus scheme is the overall case, and the sampled productions and creative personnel are sub-cases that provide nuance to the examination of how this production process works and its implications. This scope is beneficial in studying production cultures that are “far too messy, vast and contested to provide a unified code” (Caldwell, 2008: 36). In total, findings on the creative processes behind eleven films are presented, accrued from interviews with 19 industry informants who have worked on these films in various capacities (see Table 1). These sub-cases were sampled from the pool of more than 40 different projects that had participated in Audience Focus at the time of the study. Additionally, one case was included that employed audience research independent of the official scheme for comparison with the institutionalised practice.
The sub-cases and informants were chosen to represent the breadth of the Danish film culture in relation to a representative mix of genres, expected audience profiles, and the experience levels of the creative practitioners. However, there was a significant overrepresentation of first- and second-time filmmakers that had participated in the Audience Focus process, which influenced the sampling. The industry informants were chosen to represent the host of production functions in the “screen idea work group” (Macdonald, 2010), that is, the actors involved in script development, including directors, screenwriters, producers, distributors, and commissioners, and marketing consultants at the DFI. By including both gatekeepers and intermediaries (commissioners, distributors, and marketing consultants) as well as filmmakers, I seek to illuminate the use of audience research from both the producing and evaluating sides of the decision-making process to account for the negotiated nature of creative processes.
Overview of informants
| Name and role | Film info | Year interviewed | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Filmmakers | Andreas Hjortdal, producer | Fremmed (Stranger) (2025), period action drama, niche audience | 2023 |
| Christina Rosendahl, director | Fuld af kærlighed (Matters of the Heart) (2024), melodrama, mainstream audience | 2024 | |
| Jasmine Hermann Naghizadeh, producer | Kontra (2025), youth drama, youth audience | 2023 | |
| Jesper Fink, screenwriter | Birthday Girl (2024), thriller, mainstream audience and Fremmed (Stranger) (2025), period action drama, niche audience | 2024 | |
| Jonas Risvig, director | Kontra (2025), youth drama, niche audience | 2025 | |
| Kasper Rune Larsen, director | Idioten (The Idiot) (2023), drama, niche audience | 2024 | |
| Line Mørkeby, screenwriter | Smuk (Pretty Young Thing) (2022), youth drama, youth audience | 2022, 2024 | |
| Smukkere (Pretty Young Thing II) (2025), youth drama, youth audience | |||
| Louise Vesth, producer | H.C. Andersen (forthcoming), period drama, mainstream audience | 2025 | |
| Mads-August Grarup Hertz, producer | Hjem (Home) (forthcoming), melodrama, niche audience / Sauna (2025), melodrama, niche audience | 2024 | |
| Mads Hedegaard, director | Fremmed (Stranger) (2025), period action drama, niche audience | 2024 | |
| Marcella Dichmann, producer | Smuk (Pretty Young Thing) (2022), youth drama, youth audience | 2021 | |
| Smukkere (Pretty Young Thing II) (2025), youth drama, youth audience | |||
| Mathias Broe, director | Sauna (2025), melodrama, niche audience | 2024 | |
| Rasmus Birch, screenwriter | No Rest for the Wicked (forthcoming), drama, niche audience | 2025 | |
| Tilde Harkamp, director | Smuk (Pretty Young Thing) (2022), youth drama, youth audience | 2022 | |
| Gatekeepers/intermediaries | Kalle Bjerkø, film commissioner | Various films supported on the Film Commissioner’s Scheme | 2024 |
| Mette Damgaard-Sørensen, film commissioner | Various films supported on New Danish Screen | 2024 | |
| Pernille Ståhlström, market consultant | Various films on the Film Commissioner’s Scheme and New Danish Screen | 2025 | |
| Rasmus Krogh, acquisitions executive | Various films distributed by Nordisk Film | 2024 | |
| Silje Riis Næss, film commissioner | Various films supported by the Film Commissioner’s Scheme | 2025 | |
A number of methods were used for triangulating the case study. First, I obtained access to the audience research reports that were commissioned as part of the Audience Focus process for ten of the eleven projects. A written report was not available for the eleventh project, which conducted audience research independently. Document analysis of the reports was employed to establish what uncertainties the filmmakers wanted to test with audience research; what industry methods were used for conducting audience research; when in the creative process audience insights were used; as well as the audience input that filmmakers gained. The insights springing from these “fully-embedded deep texts” (Caldwell, 2008: 347) proved highly illuminating and were used to frame my semistructured qualitative interview design, which is the second and main method for the study.
Following Bruun (2016) and Hertz and Imber (1995), these industry informants are considered “exclusive” and “elite”, due to their access to privileged knowledge about audience research in creative processes in the Danish context. As has been dealt with in methods literature, studying elites comes with several challenges: Gaining access to these individuals can be challenging and time-consuming (Frandsen & Bruun, 2017), the relation between researcher and elite can be marked by asymmetry (Bruun, 2016), and the informants can be bound by corporate agreements and secrecy (Rasmussen, 2024) as well as a motivation to self-promote in a precarious industry where workers must “sell” themselves to gain their next job (Redvall & Sørensen, 2021).
In this study, I was allowed relatively thorough access to informants and their working documents. Many of them were particularly interested in sharing their experiences with the new audience-centric work processes, as it was seen as a novel initiative. However, several of them also articulated worries that voicing critique could put them in a precarious situation when applying for funding at the DFI for their next projects. For this reason, I opted for focusing on the films that had been greenlit for production funding subsequent to their Audience Focus process. Had I conducted interviews with some of the projects that did not gain production funding after participating in the Audience Focus initiative, it might have been difficult to speak about the process, as failure is often taboo in these industries (Redvall, 2023). However, by omitting this perspective, I might also have silenced more critical responses.
The interviews were “reconstruction interviews” (Reich & Barnoy, 2016), as the informants were asked to reconstruct the Audience Focus process and how insights were used. Reconstruction interviews are valuable for making invisible practices in the backstage of the production culture visible and prompting “industrial reflexivity” (Caldwell, 2008), as the informants put their practice into words. Thus, it helps unlock the “meaning-making activities” of media professionals – that is, their practices, rituals, beliefs, and values – which are core in production studies (Herbert et al., 2020: 49). A negative implication of conducting interviews retroactively is that the production process can be misremembered and the reconstruction is reliant on self-reporting, where informants may perform “corporate spin” and other types of polished versions of their practice (Caldwell, 2008). However, access to the written audience reports allowed me to ask questions about the sometimes critical audience feedback, circumventing spin.
The data was coded thematically according to the principles of reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) using the software NVivo. Through the iterative process of data familiarisation and systematic coding, I developed themes in the data that could inform existing theorisations of the use of audience research in creative processes. The data was analysed inductively, meaning that my analysis is rooted in the data itself rather than approached through a preexisting coding frame based on theory.
While the findings are context specific to the eleven sampled film projects, several themes occurred across the empirical body. The themes are structured in four subsections: 1) experiences of creative uncertainty; 2) using audience research; 3) filtering and resisting audience research; and 4) discussion of audience research as a way to mitigate creative uncertainty. I discuss the theoretical implications of the findings continuously throughout the next sections.
A significant finding was that the interviewed filmmakers constantly grappled with creative uncertainty related to choosing specific creative directions, not knowing if they were the right paths. This was often the impetus for conducting audience research to gain outside perspectives on whether the project was on the right track. This was encapsulated by director Mathias Broe: “As we immerse ourselves deeply into the material, we inevitably become lost in it. At this point, we need an outside perspective to understand the audience’s experience of the material”. Similarly, director Jonas Risvig described getting audience feedback as helping him “sleep at night” by providing confirmation of his ideas:
In my work, I constantly pressure test my projects through audience input. I am very unsure of my material, probably more so than other writers with the confidence to work on a vision for two years. I don’t have that confidence. I am constantly in doubt, so testing the idea early on provides validation, knowing its relevance.
The uncertainty springs from the aforementioned “infinite variety” principle (Caves, 2000), where picking the right solution among the infinite creative possibilities can become overwhelming for filmmakers, but several of the informants also link creative uncertainty to the isolated nature of the creative process, where the filmmaking teams normally work without cues from the audiences they are creating for. For instance, former artistic director of New Danish Screen, Mette Damgaard-Sørensen, described the creative development process as a “bubble”, where the creative team make choices based on their creative vision, interests, and what they believe will work, sometimes without considering their audience. She contended that “it is paramount to be confronted with perspectives from outside the development process, because, ultimately, the project will face a reality where people aren’t loyal to it”. According to Damgaard-Sørensen, this marks a shift from saying “‘the film is important to me’, to asking ‘why is the film important for audiences?’ This process can be daunting, but it helps the filmmakers clarify what they want to say, to whom, and how they want to say it”.
As such, the prevalent motivation for getting audience feedback was for filmmakers to test whether their ideas worked with audiences as intended. A market consultant at the DFI, Pernille Ståhlström, described the benefits of this process:
Getting new readers is valuable to see if there are misunderstandings, something that isn’t clear or can be interpreted differently. This is important, as applying for funding entails intensive conversations between the film commissioners and the filmmakers, meaning that, sometimes, elements of the project can become implicit.
Here, Ståhlström speaks to the benefits of getting perspectives from outside the creative team and the adjacent consultants and gatekeepers, as the bubble nature of this process can cause story elements to become implicit.
This section deals with how audience research was used in the creative process. The central findings reveal how audience feedback can both stimulate new ideas and be leveraged for autonomy, which can lead to certainty, but also cause tension and uncertainty if it conflicts with the creative vision. Importantly, the results reveal that audience data does not provide a roadmap to follow but is a negotiated process where the insights are filtered by the filmmakers, using some and discarding others.
Across the dataset, audience research was used to gain outside perspectives on the filmmakers’ materials by testing specific story elements: Does this scene seem believable? Are audiences aligned with the main character? What fascinates audiences about the film’s themes or arena? To answer these questions, the creative teams selected various stimuli for testing, for example, central scenes, character descriptions, theme descriptions, and synopses or story outlines. The stimuli were mostly presented at the screenplay stage, with either written excerpts or intermediaries presenting it orally to the test audiences.
Often, feedback revolved around elements that audiences perceived as inauthentic. For instance, producer Mads-August Grarup Hertz explained how the team behind Home (Jankovich, forthcoming) changed details regarding the design of the main character’s fashionable home, as audiences perceived this element as caricatured. Producer Jasmine Hermann Naghizadeh mentioned how they changed aspects of their depiction of Danish youth culture in Kontra (Risvig, 2024), such as substance abuse, since Danish youth audiences considered this highly Americanised and inauthentic. Other typical insights relate to the likability of the main characters and the understanding of their motivations. For instance, screenwriter Jesper Fink received notes on the anti-hero protagonist of his film Birthday Girl (Noer, 2024) being unrelatable and hard to root for because of her flaws.
Audience research also helped the filmmakers become more knowledgeable about what type of film they were making. For instance, Mathias Broe used audience feedback to prioritise the themes in his LGBTQ+ film Sauna (Broe, 2025), which he was unsure whether to position as a love story or an LGBTQ+ drama. This prioritisation allowed for clearer communication both to his audience and creative team. Another feedback type relates to how audiences understand and engage with specific story elements, which, for instance, allowed the filmmakers to test hypotheses about what would captivate audiences and whether the story was understood by audiences as intended. For producer Andreas Hjortdal and director Mads Hedegaard, audience research helped them test whether their film Stranger (Hedegaard, 2025), set in the Stone Age with a made-up language, would work with audiences, as well as which pitch of the plot resonated the most. Screenwriter Rasmus Birch explained that audience feedback led the creative team behind No Rest for the Wicked (Kalle, forthcoming) to emphasise an equal love relationship between the two main characters, despite their age difference, to avoid unwanted audience associations to problematic portrayals of uneven age-gap romances.
As exemplified in the above, the audience notes were varied, and the steps taken to heed them differed. Overall, the feedback was primarily used to adjust details within the existing narrative structure. Several informants stressed that they were often surprised by how audiences interpreted specific elements, as they differed from the filmmakers’ own intentions, highlighting the uncertainty of audience reception and how audience research can to some extent mitigate this. The audience research can also be leveraged to justify existing choices if the feedback confirms that a production is on the right path, allowing filmmakers to push back against risk-reduction strategies. For instance, screenwriter Rasmus Birch said “there is a tendency in our craft to talk down to your audience, making sure everyone can follow the story, because the economy is so tight”, echoing the “nobody dares” principle. However, he experienced that the audience research increased his autonomy, as the feedback aligned with the creative vision: “Our audience test actually found that the audiences proved more open to challenging narratives than we expected”, allowing the creative team to stand their ground against risk-reduction strategies imposed by financiers. This exemplified one of the ways that audience research can be leveraged in the “complicated power plays among creators and gatekeepers”, described by Timothy Havens (2014: 8), to strengthen creative autonomy, as audience opinion can provide certainty about creative choices.
However, audience research can also cause creative tension if the comments are deemed difficult to transfer into action. For instance, director Jonas Risvig described the frustrating experience of trying to test what he intended to be the emotional climax of his film, and subsequently being unable to figure out why audiences did not see it as the climax:
Sometimes you can’t answer what it is that makes people respond differently than yourself. It could be the music, the dialogue. Who knows? Sometimes you need distance from the material before being able to see it clearly.
This point harks back to Todd Gitlin’s (1983: 35) finding that “raw data always have to be interpreted” to be actionable. Consequently, creative uncertainty lingers.
Another significant finding about the use of audience research in creative processes is that the insights are filtered according to the creative vision, meaning that sometimes the filmmakers choose to not heed audience opinion. Director Mathias Broe described this process as “breaking the material open and picking up the pieces that resonate” with the original screen idea. Underpinning this filtering process are notions that responding to feedback is a “balancing act, as you can’t satisfy everyone”, as expressed by Tilde Harkamp. For instance, Jesper Fink decided to not make his main character more likeable, despite audiences’ finding her hard to root for, because the creative team saw the character’s flaws as her most human trait. Director Mads Hedegaard and producer Andreas Hjortdal decided not to make the characters in their Stone Age film Stranger (Hedegaard, 2025) look dirty and primitive, despite most audiences associating the Stone Age with a lack of hygiene and being thrown off by the characters’ cleanliness and advanced communication. Here, the team’s historical research trumped audience sentiment, as they knew from historical accounts that cleanliness was important in the Stone Age to not catch diseases. In the testing process of Pretty Young Thing, director Tilde Harkamp (2022), screenwriter Line Mørkeby, and producer Marcella Dichmann were faced with audience responses that found the film’s high school drama bordering on “outdated gender stereotypes”. However, these stereotypes were built into the story, and changing them would require radical transformations, which were not compatible with the production timeline. As such, “quick fixes” were applied to change the dynamics within the overall structure.
These examples show that audience research results do not trump all other considerations but allow filmmakers to consider changing their story as they filter the input according to its perceived importance for the project. Frequently, informants described feeling assured about their creative choices following the audience responses, even if the feedback could be perceived as critical to those very same choices. In a few cases, I found that repeated audience tests during screenwriting and post-production showed that similar criticisms from audiences stalked the projects across these sites of development, suggesting that the filmmakers did not sufficiently act on the feedback in the first place, or that the criticisms were built into the core idea of the project, making them difficult – or even undesirable – to redeem. This points to the finding that filmmakers also frequently resist using the audience research.
If audience feedback is not aligned with the premise of the creative intentions, it can be discarded and resisted by filmmakers. This underlines the negotiated nature of the process and challenges common perceptions about audience research as risk reduction and rationalisation, as human interpretation of the data is marked by creative uncertainty, which is explored in this section.
Harkamp exemplified the resistance by cautioning that audience input should not be instrumental in the creative process, as you may end up making a different film than the one intended: “You must set the creative course of the ship, otherwise, you will lose focus and drown. The input must be sorted according to the course you have set”. However, even negative feedback that is ultimately discarded can still be valuable for engendering creative reflection, screenwriter Line Mørkeby observed: “It’s worth considering if you want to change things. If you don’t adjust, at least you have reflected on why you aren’t changing things”. Several informants similarly described how gaining new perspectives can be valuable even if the audience sentiments are not then accommodated, underlining that using audience research is as much about considering outside perspectives as it is about creativity being streamlined by data.
In fact, several informants chose to do the opposite of what was suggested by audiences to provoke a stronger reaction or challenge audiences by going against the grain, for instance, by adding unsympathetic traits to characters. This hinges on another recurring notion in the data, namely that “audiences don’t always know what they want”, in the words of producer Marcella Dichmann, indicating an industry understanding that in audience research there are no silver bullets for how to improve a film. In this vein, screenwriter Jesper Fink pointed out that using audience input entails deciphering “the note behind the note”. Audiences may challenge the creative ideas, but the filmmakers must make sense of the reasons prompting their responses. As former film commissioner Mette Damgaard-Sørensen mentioned: “The strong creative teams don’t just do what the audience tells them to do. They analyse the notes and find new creative solutions to the underlying problems”, highlighting again that the process of putting insights into creative action involves interpretation and problem-solving.
Navigating these differing, and sometimes contradictory, audience inputs as well as industry interests can increase creative uncertainty, which can be mitigated through resistance. Former film commissioner Silje Riis Næss described this tension: “Some artists are very sensitive to the world. They need protection, as they are not able to filter, which can interfere with their creative process”. This points to the contentions inherent to audience research, involving an interesting dynamic, where the informants see filmmakers as needing protection from audience input to safeguard creative freedom, and, at the same time, should be open to considering the input as additional creative fuel. It also highlights how artistic and pragmatic views of creativity can come into tension, involving a challenging balance of when to listen and when to trust the creative vision.
While several informants embrace a pragmatic approach to creativity by being open to audience research stimulating new ideas, another important finding is that many of the same informants also view audience research as a potential constraint on creativity, in line with the artistic tradition of creativity. Resultingly, they frequently highlight their own autonomy in using the audience insights. This is in line with other studies that have found creative producers to accentuate their own workplace autonomy (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011: 40), even in cases where it is circumscribed (Draper, 2014), and especially concerning the use of audience research, which is often considered “the opposite of being creative” (Rasmussen, 2024: 14). For instance, screenwriter Jesper Fink expressed concern that caving to audience opinion could lead to overly simplified narratives, although he explicates that the insights were not forced on the creative team, thus highlighting his own autonomy in the audience research process and the non-creative nature of catering to audience opinion.
The above findings show that, on the one hand, audience research can provide outside perspectives on film projects in development that can stimulate the creative process and prompt changes, thus promoting pragmatic and sociocultural creativity. On the other hand, the findings show that these new perspectives are often subordinate to the filmmakers’ creative visions, thus supporting the creative freedom of practitioners. This is in line with the artistic tradition of creativity and contrary to warnings of audience research leading to restricted autonomy (Hesmondhalgh, 2018). The study underlines that using audience research creatively is not necessarily about being more commercial by giving audiences what they think they want, but it is rather a creative negotiation reliant on human filtering and interpretation. This challenges accounts that consider audience research a path to circumventing the “nobody knows” principle, as the findings highlight that audience research does not provide a definitive guide for “figuring out” how to achieve audience engagement. Even if the filmmakers act on the feedback, uncertainty about whether the adjustments will elicit improved audience responses persists if testing is not conducted again, and there is no way of knowing whether these proxy test audiences will resemble the actual audiences upon release.
However, most of the informants still described how the audience research validated or confirmed their decision-making, minimising their creative uncertainty and helping them push forward in their process, even if this validation is sometimes artificial, as the informants choose which input to listen to, sometimes ignoring more critical sentiments. The use of audience research is effective in giving the creative practitioners a change of perspective and structuring the often messy development process, but in the Danish context, it is not a silver bullet for streamlining production according to audience sentiment and for enabling prediction.
Still, Damgaard-Sørensen argued that even when audience research is used primarily for confirmation, it can still be an asset for mitigating creative uncertainty:
The teams benefit enormously from it, even if everything that the audiences brought up was already a part of our conversations about the project during development meetings. They find faith in the projects and begin believing in them. It serves as an important assurance that audiences are interested in the project.
Producer Louise Vesth reiterated this sentiment:
I see audience testing as a gift that can confirm hypotheses or assumptions about the project. Would I have arrived at the same conclusions without doing the tests? Most definitely. Nonetheless, it gives assurance to test it even if the answers are banal.
However, Vesth also underlined that uncertainty will always be embedded in creative processes: “Transferring those insights into cinema is a completely different process. Ultimately cinema is about leaning into the unknown. It is about creating something that we didn’t know we needed”. As such, creative uncertainty is inherent to the ideation process. Echoing this, screenwriter Jesper Fink said: “No one has the golden key. It is impossible to figure out what will work and predict the future, because as human beings we are drawn towards what’s new and exciting”. These quotes underline that human interpretation and instincts remain key in the creative process, and this process is equally marked by the creative uncertainty of leaping into the unknown.
The persistence of uncertainty relates to the basic properties of both qualitative and quantitative audience research, according to the informants. Acquisitions executive at Nordisk Film Distribution Rasmus Krogh acknowledged that while his company spends significant resources on both quantitative and qualitative audience research, it is “not an exact science” due to the limitations of testing. He explained: “You can’t ask audiences directly what they want – they can’t answer that. It’s too abstract”. Citing Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (2012), Krogh noted:
Had we asked people if they wanted to see a film about a teacher accused of paedophilia, the answer would’ve been no. Yet it became a box-office hit for many reasons. Conversely, we’ve tested films that showed a potential of selling upwards of 1 million tickets but ended up selling just 60,000.
According to Krogh, gut instinct about what will work remains key in combination with data. Nevertheless, Krogh mentioned that data carries “great rhetorical value” in creative discussions, lending “scientific” weight to what might otherwise be dismissed as personal taste. Different stakeholders can thus use audience research to justify their opinions, pulling the creative idea in different directions according to their mandate, with implications for the autonomy of creative workers (see Freudendal, forthcoming). This finding corroborates analytical points from Gans and Caldwell that underline how audience research often functions as an indicator of symbolic power.
The informants’ lack of belief in audience research measures’ predictive abilities was often ascribed to the limitations of sample size and the testing stimuli available (mostly intermediary materials such as screenplay drafts or rough cuts), as well as issues of timing. Regarding timing, several informants mentioned that testing too early can reinforce creative doubts and even contaminate the creative idea if the material is underdeveloped and the filmmakers are too impressionable. Conversely, testing too late leaves little room to act on insights due to tight production schedules. As director Tilde Harkamp noted: “Once you’re on set, it’s too late to make significant changes”. The paradox of timing prompted some of the filmmakers to seek validation rather than critique, as they were too deep into development to accommodate major changes such as recasting or shifting narrative emphases. Furthermore, some informants stressed that even when testing the screenplays of upcoming films, the tests are still coloured by audiences’ past experiences, as they lack the competences to imagine future films, according to producer Louise Vesth:
Talking to audiences always points to the past, as their answers about what they want to see will be based on what they’ve seen and liked in the past. What interests us as filmmakers is creating something new – and you can’t ask audiences to imagine artistic ideas based on a screenplay. If anyone had tested Lars von Trier’s films before they were made, audiences probably would have said, ‘No, we don’t want to see that’. So, it’s important not to give it too much weight. We can’t figure it out, and no audience test can. You must rely on expertise and professional judgment.
The difficulties in finding the ideal moment for testing, as well as the optimal material to test and methods to use, highlight broader challenges regarding the reliability of not just qualitative audience research but audience research in general. Filmmakers frequently justified dismissing feedback by arguing that test audiences lacked context to warrant their feedback, for instance, due to the intermediary test materials that mostly consist of excerpts of written scenes, story outlines, or other types of fragmented materials that cannot convey the full scope of a film and its audiovisual components. Several informants emphasised that test screenings of nearly finished films generate the most valuable audience insights, which contradicts Audience Focus’s rationale that early feedback is just as valuable. At the test screening stage, audiences respond to the almost finished audiovisual work, rather than having to speculate about the missing audiovisual cues in a screenplay. Yet by then, fundamental changes are rarely possible, though adjustments to structure, length, or dialogue may still occur.
Speaking to the predictive capacity of audience research, former film commissioner Silje Riis Næss said that “audience tests do not represent the final truth about a film, who will watch it, or how critics will respond”. Næss added that this is also in part linked to a methodological concern regarding test audiences becoming overly invested in the project because they are asked to give detailed feedback, which prompts them to overthink their response – a scenario unlikely during normal cinema-going, which reinforces the bubble nature of the creative process:
It’s a catch-22. They’re asked to familiarise themselves with the project and the intentions behind it, becoming quasi-insiders. As such, they are inclined to respond positively. Therefore, we must ask ourselves if we’re still in the echo chamber. It’s not easy to answer but crucial to consider.
This echo chamber risk is amplified by selective sampling practices. Test audiences are sometimes recruited based on taste in films or sociodemographic traits, rather than representativeness. For example, ethnic minority audiences may be recruited to test a film about being an ethnic minority aimed at ethnic minority audiences. On the one hand, this raises questions about generalisability. On the other hand, it allows focus on target niche audiences, which is understandable, as screenwriter Rasmus Birch observed, since testing an arthouse film on audiences uninterested in arthouse makes little sense.
In sum, I find audience research to not simply be a risk-reduction measure or a path to predicting what will work with unpredictable audiences. Rather, it is a highly negotiated process that can both increase and reduce creative uncertainty, depending on how it is used. This also has to do with the recalcitrant nature of the audience research methods used in Denmark, where the goal is to allow complex and heterogeonous audience opinions rather than reducing their perspectives to uniform and prescriptive insights (Søltoft & Munk, 2025). However, I would still argue that in the instances where tech platforms accumulate billions of data points, as in Amanda Lotz’s example, translating these into creative action remains an uncertain venture, as making sense of the overabundance of data (Havens, 2014) and generating creative ideas that will resonate based on it is highly reliant on human interpretation. Furthermore, the quantitative data of platforms are derived from past behaviour about already produced projects, making it even harder to transfer insights into new projects – not least because this type of data does not analyse the quality of the audiences’ viewing experience. In this light, the use of audience research should also be viewed as a symbolic practice that can increase professionalism and legitimacy by making decision-making appear more rationalised in times of intensified competition (Napoli, 2008: 34). Thus, the Audience Focus initiative can warrant that the DFI are, as a state funded institution, in touch with the publics they are meant to serve, even if the filmmakers do not always listen to these publics, as they safeguard their creative freedom.
This article has contributed to research about data-driven decision-making’s influence on media production, providing needed nuance to the dominant scholarship on the topic. Existing research largely considers audience research and data a tool for rationalising decision-making and mitigating the economic uncertainty of media production, thereby functioning as an important risk reduction measure in a highly competitive media environment. Some scholars even suggest that the accumulation of data about audiences will ultimately mean the end of the “nobody knows” principle of media production. Yet, there is a lack of research on how audience data functions in creative production processes to substantiate such claims.
This study has addressed this research gap by providing unique empirical data from the Danish film production culture, where a novel audience research initiative that prompts filmmakers to engage with proxy audiences via testing during the script development stage of production has been institutionalised. From this locus, I have explored whether the use of audience research increases or reduces uncertainty during the creative process. In doing so, I have argued that the uncertainty of production is not solely related to the challenges of predicting audience success from an economic rationale, as has traditionally been the case in management and economy literature on the topic. Instead, by introducing the concept of creative uncertainty, I have shown how uncertainty is embedded in the creative process itself, as filmmakers navigate the “infinite variety” principle of production and determine which creative ideas are best suited for their projects. A central argument in the study is that due to the creative uncertainty of film production, the accumulation of data about audience preferences does not simply circumvent the “nobody knows” principle, as the process of translating audience insights into concrete creative actions that will stimulate those preferences is a highly uncertain venture.
This is the case due to the negotiated process of integrating audience research into creative processes. Three main findings unpack the nature of these negotiations: 1) The use of audience research entails a filtering process where the filmmakers select which input to listen to, sometimes opting to do the opposite of what was suggested by audiences; 2) The informants frequently resisted audience feedback if it conflicted with the creative vision; 3) In the cases where the feedback was used to make changes, the feedback corresponded with the filmmakers’ own creative idea, thus affording the filmmakers a sense of certainty that they were aligned with audiences, even if they simultaneously ignored other more critical sentiments. The informants described the value of audience research primarily as a tool to gain an outside perspective in the creative process, even if this perspective is mostly subordinate to the creative vision of the filmmakers.
As such, the use of audience research is not simply a measure to give audiences what they think that want, but a complex process of balancing the creative intent with the outside perspectives of audiences and coming up with new creative solutions based on their feedback – a process that will always be marked by uncertainty, as the informants cannot know with exactitude if their inferences based on the feedback will lead to improved audience engagement. This negotiated process furthermore highlights the tensions between creativity and audiences, where a dichotomy between the two is seen to persist in the production culture’s self-understanding, even if some filmmakers adopt a more pragmatic approach by considering audience input as additional creative fuel. These negotiations come to the fore when the filmmakers leverage audience insights to warrant their decisions, or, conversely, experience creative tension when the insights conflict with their creative intent. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that methodological constraints – including sample size, test timing, and intermediary test stimuli – further limit the predictive value of these practices. These findings indicate that the use of audience research to guide creative processes is also a symbolic process that gives the appearance of data-driven and rational decision-making, which is a valuable currency in a market defined by uncertainty.
While the findings reflect the study’s focus on a small nation’s production culture, shaped by a cultural mandate and strong creative autonomy that equips filmmakers to better resist audience input, the central point about the tension between creativity and audiences – as well as the mechanisms of negotiation between creativity and audience data – are generalisable to commercial production cultures. Although the audience research methods examined here were largely qualitative, my hypothesis is that the challenge of translating audience insights into creative action persists regardless of the scale and scope of data. Future research could compare subsidised and commercial industries, or small and large national markets, to better understand how these different contexts shape the integration of data into creative decision-making. Such work is urgently needed, as empirical studies remain sparse, and industry claims about the rationalising power of audience research often go unchallenged. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that audience research does not dissolve creative uncertainty but instead reshapes it, making the negotiations between artistic vision and data a contentious feature of contemporary media production.