How Do media professionals "Know" their audiences?

The question of how media professionals know what to sell to their audience has been looked at many times over the years. Of course all types of media are looking for ratings because these ratings then help the people who are putting the media out know what people like and more importantly what people will buy. Some of the ways professionals “know” how we feel about products are by taking surveys and getting direct feedback from people. Another way is by putting devices in or attached to things like TVs so it can measure directly what and when people are watching it. One other thing that can be looked at is how much are ‘the people’ talking about something in the media. The internet is an easy way now to learn what people think about any type of media because things like blogs and other website are put up online with people voicing how they feel about everything. Even on store websites with every product there is a section where customers can leave comments about the produce (a movie, TV show, book, CD, etc.) As much as we want to say the media asked us what we want to see in reality the media controls so much of what we think that as long as they do a good job selling it people will buy it. We see things like ‘the most watched TV show’ but then again about 10 shows are saying that and they cannot all be the most watched. This is because the professionals are selling us this “idea” that it is the most watched show and therefore why are we not one of the ones watching it? These are just some of the ways that media professionals can try to “know” their audiences and how the audiences feel about the media and how much the media prefessionals control it.