Task Three

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

through looking at theorists such as Roland Barthes our group discovered the importance of meeting audience expectations. For instance, an audience who enjoys the country western genre will expect all the connotations that come with listening to the genre such as cowboy hats, guitars and horses. The country western genre is predominantly aimed at Americans, from a specific area in America.

Blummer and Katz

These two theorists created the theory of ‘uses and gratifications’. We used their theory to asses our audience response. This is the theory in which they argue that audience responds to media texts in four ways.

1) The audience identify with the characters on the screen
Personal Identity, the ability to compare one’s life with the characters and situations within programmes and hence explore personal problems and perspectives. No matter from where or what class any audience member we have can also compare their life to the lives of the character’s on screen. We can even identify with the pain and heartache or even confusion as many people go through thee emotions in life.

2) Diversion
Blummer and Katz say that Diversion is the ability to get away or escape mentally from everyday realities. Blummer and Katz say that in order for a media text to be diverting it has to occupy the viewer for more than 70% of the time. Our target audience could defiantly see our video as something they could relate to therefore watching it takes them away from pressures of school, university, home, emotional stress and even the pains of heartache.

3) Personal Relationship: Blummer and Katz say that personal relationship is about the ability to be able to identify themselves with the characters within the media text.
4) Surveillance: The forth is Surveillance, a supply of information about “what’s going on” in the world.

Stuart Halls theory: Hall looked at 3 ways of encoding images…

* A preferred reading
* An aberrant reading
* A negotiated reading- where feedback group may come back with something that hadn’t been considered in the finished product (An area that could have been improved on).

What have you learned from your audience feed back?

To asses audience feedback we took data from various sources. Firstly, the promo was uploaded onto YouTube so audiences all over the world could easily access our product and write comments on the same page, like you tube we also used our online blogs on the Blogger site. . We also used a Focus Group and friends to answer a questionnaire. I tried to use open questions and a thorough discussion with all members of the focus group through out and realised this was a small scale trial of our pop video and ancillary products.

In terms of our target audience we aimed our product at both males and females. Men could potentially relate themselves to the artist who is portrayed as somewhat of an enigma however he is also conveyed as someone with real charcteristics, as he is not “glammed” up, therefore reducing his chances of becoming a threat to the male sex. Females may relate to the video in the sense that although our star shows realism he also shows a lot of sexual magnetism about him, he’s young and looks attractively rebellious. We hade to concider the age of our target audience and came to the conclusion that anything from 17 to late 20s would suit as we thought any younger and they may not be able to fully understand or appreciate the emotional message we are trying to reveal through our video. In terms of Jictar, we believed that are appropriate target audience was B C D and E these people fit into a minority of classes in society, our main audience are teenagers who are disenfranchised from the adult world, who feel somewhat isolated. Our audience are able to discover their identity for the first time and may relate to the artist as they have most likely encountered relationship issues that were serious for the first time. We chose these people, as they would probably be most likely to appreciate the artistic, modern, urbanised and emotional video that we produced.

Through the use of a Focus Group, we wanted to discover whether our target audience enjoyed and understood the message we were trying to put across, the narrative, the representation of the character and if they could identify with them, how our video could be improved and even if they liked the song we had chosen. At the beginning of our Focus Group session we wanted to address some main points and get some specific answers, so we showed the video and handed out this questionnaire done through the use of the website www.surveymonkey.com

1. Age?
2. Male or female?
3. Favorite music genre?
4. What other forms of media do you use to keep up to date with music?
5. What would you expect to be in a country and western pop video?
6. From the image shown, is the genre of country and western easily recognizable?
7. What type of people do you expect to watch/listen to country and western music?

Did this video stick to or subvert stereotypes about a country and western pop video?

There were a variety of reasons as to why we used a focus group instead of any other methods. One advantage of a focus group was, that people take your questions seriously and consider their answers and get some qualitative results. Secondly, with a questionnaire you have to wait for it to be filled out and then have to read through the information on it, where as the advantage of a focus group is that after asking the questions you get instant answers in return this is quicker, it also means you get an answer that is direct and too the point you don’t have to shift through vast amount of information that is most likely not reliable anyway. Finally, when you are in a focus group it is a face to face process, this allows you to not only see their emotions and reactions to your video but also means that you can start interesting discussions that relate to our pop video.. Are focus group gave us a good insight of how others see our video.

Furthermore, we wanted to check the following with our target audience:

* That decisions we made in the construction and planning were accurate.
* That we read our audience correctly
* That the star image was commercially successful and worth investing further
* That audiences would gain considerable value from the product
* That there was no misinterpretations of the image and messages we have created

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