The audience design model was inspired by Giles' communication accommodation theory and Bell's own research on the speech of radio news broadcasters in New Zealand.
The other, a local community station, drew a broader range of listeners including those from lower socioeconomic brackets.
Bell's analysis of the newsreaders' speech revealed that they spoke differently based on the intended radio audience.
He identified relationships in the frequency of sociolinguistic variables, such as postvocalic [t], which corresponded to the speech of the radio audiences.
The audience design framework distinguishes between several kinds of audience types based on three criteria from the perspective of the speaker: known (whether an addressee is known to be part of a speech context), ratified (the speaker acknowledges the listener's presence in the speech context), or addressed (the listener is directly spoken to).