1. Question 2: What Have You
Learnt From Your Audience
Feedback?
By William Stephenson
2. Why Does Target Audience Matter
& What Is My Target Audience?
Target audience feedback is very important when making a media
product because you ultimately have to meet the audience’s needs so
that they buy your product, but in this case so that they go and watch
our film.
Throughout the duration of our coursework we conducted multiple
research activities to find out what our audience’s needs were and
what they wanted to see in our main task and our ancillary tasks,
which relates to the theory by Katz known as the 'Uses and
Gratifications Theory.' This theory is to do with a media producer
understanding what the audience desires and then using various types
of media to satisfy their specific needs. Our target audience was
teenagers of the age of 12 years old to 18 years old, which is the main
reason we made a teen movie.
3. In our research section we made a questionnaire on the website ‘SurveyNuts’ to find out
things like: what genre our movie/trailer should be, what kind of music should be in the
background of the trailer and various aspects of mise en scene; like location and props.
This kind of feedback was useful because it meant that we could understand what a
large group of our target audience wanted to see, however because they were closed
questions we couldn’t ask them about why they wanted to see these things or what
things they wanted to see that weren’t in the questionnaire, which was a negative for
this type of qualitative data collection.
This is why we then did an interview with two people who fitted into our target
audience. This interview enabled us to ask detailed questions and ask our interviewees
why they thought some of the things they did. By having this option, it meant that the
feedback was very useful because we could understand more about what our target
audience wanted to see from our media product and how we could interact with them
better. For example, when I asked, "if one of your friends went missing, how would
react?" I got responses that said that they would be, "scared," and that they would,
"want to find out what happened to them." For these reasons we asked our protagonists
actor to act scared and worried for lots of the shots but also asked her to really act as if
she was desperately looking for her friend.
SurveyNuts & Interviewing
4. One of the main ways we got feedback from our target audience was when we did a
showcase of our media product in front of about 30 teenagers, of the age range of 12
years old to 18 years old. We showed them our main task (the trailer) and gave them
pre-made feedback forms which we asked them to fill out. They would give a score for
different parts of our trailer, for example there were score charts about camera quality,
sound and acting.
This showcase was very significant in helping us fit our trailers around the demands of
our target audience because similarly to our questionnaires in the research section, it
gave us all an insight into different preferences of our target audience. By looking at
these feedback forms, we found that there was a particular section in our trailer where
the quality of the sound noticeably dropped which our target audience had picked up
on. The song we had chosen for this part of the project was not one that the audience
responded well to because it was a song that not only didn’t fit with what was
happening, but it was a song that wasn’t liked by many of our audience, meaning we
weren’t meeting their demands. We swiftly changed the sound in this section to then
meet their needs, once again relating to the Uses and Gratifications theory by Katz.
How The Showcase Helped Us
5. As well as doing planned feedback sessions throughout the duration of our project, we
continuously asked people who fitted the demographic of our target audience how we
could improve our work to get something that they liked. Members of other classes and
friends were frequently asked by the group and I to come in and give their opinions on
our project. When we asked a number of our audience to come in and look at our main
task and our ancillary tasks, one of the pieces of feedback that they gave was that the
colours on the movie poster didn’t work together. Therefore we changed the colours to
some colours that matched better because it is what our target audience wanted to see.
This piece of feedback was very significant during the making of our movie poster
because it made it look more professional and a lot neater.
The main comments about our main task were to change the length of some of the clips.
For example, at 0:43 in our trailer, there is a scene where Aiden is dead on a playground
roundabout and Lily finds him there, however something that my group and I didn't
notice was that his head moved slightly, which a dead person obviously doesn't do. When
one of our target audience who was analysing our trailer spotted this, we reduced the
length of the clip so that this wasn't included because it was a mistake that we had not
noticed when editing. Alternatively, we could have re-filmed the scene but when we
were editing the clip we found that we could just cut it out without having to re-film.
Regular Feedback & Its Effects
6. In Conclusion...
In conclusion, the target audience research that we collected during our coursework was
very significant to us because it meant that we could see exactly what the people who
the promotional package wanted to see. Without the target audience research, I think
that our promotional package wouldn’t have been as focused on the people that it was
made for and they would have received it in a bad way, which relates to the 'Reception
Theory' by Hans Roberts Jauss.
