2. Age is another category that is part of Hartley’s
classification. It is often an important category to look
into as the age of your audience often plays into what
hobbies and interests they have. Having said this, there
are also times when age isn’t such a major factor as
there can be groups of people who all enjoy a certain
hobby but are of different ages. I still think that age is
something I should consider because it will ensure my
marketing campaign appeals to a certain demographic
which I will show through the visual elements and
narrative of the film.
3. In order to make a sure decision of the age of my
target audience, I will look back at the previous
data I have collected regarding psychological
thrillers. This ensures that a will make an
informed decision which will help me keep focus
when producing my marketing campaign as I
will have a specific target audience in mind.
Having said this, it is still important for me to
appeal to a wider secondary audience so that I
attract the largest possible audience I can.
5. As you can see from the previous slide, the age demographic for psychological
thrillers ranged from 18-45 with the main groups being 22-27,28-35 and 36-45.
However, when I collected my survey data, I only had 30 responses which is a
relatively small sample size. Therefore in order to knuckle down what my exact
age demographic should be I took to the website YouGov again. Previously I
used this website to look at the action thriller film Taken. This time I wanted to
focus specifically on the age demographic of psychological thriller films.
To do this I selected 5 psychological thriller films and looked specifically at the
age demographic of them to see if there were any patterns and trends within the
genre. This is more accurate than my survey because of the fact that the
YouGov surveys are taken by thousands of people and therefore will give a
more accurate representation of demographic.
I looked into the demographic of the films, Inception, Gone Girl, Black Swan,
Shutter Island and The Gift. I chose these as they have all been released in the
last decade and are therefore modern enough that they will follow similar
patterns and trends as today.
8. From my findings I can see that 4/5 of the psychological thriller films had a
majority age demographic of 25-39. The only one that did not was The Gift
however even this film had a 21.3% 25-39 year old age demographic.
The least popular age demographic happened to be 18-24 year olds as this
scored the lowest percentile in all 5 films. This leads me to conclude that I
should be targeting my film to an older rather than younger demographic.
Having said this, 25 is still quite young and it is likely the hobbies, interests
and like of a 25 year old would differ from that of a 39 year old which is why
age is such a tricky way to categorise people. This is why I will continue
ensure my marketing campaign does appeal to a wide range of people as their
may be a certain audience that miss out on watching a film that they would
enjoy.
So to conclude, my target age demographic is 25-39 year olds as all my data
and research has led me to believe psychological thriller films are most
enjoyed by people in this age category.
