3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback was probably the most valuable source of information we obtained throughout the whole of our project, not only in the last evaluation stages but in research and planning also. In this question I will explain what our target audience was, how audience feedback came in use within each stage in the process and what we learnt from it.

Research and Planning

'What is our target audience?' was one of the first questions we asked ourselves right at the beginning of the project. We addressed this with consideration to our personal strengths as a group and the nature of the industry. For example, as girly females we felt that we could relate to people our age, and so would recognize the means to target them most effectively. Therefore, it seemed appropriate to be targeting this demographic with our artist, as we ourselves are living in a world where we are constantly targeted by the media. Secondly, after analysing the target markets of many industry artists, we discovered the trend that with girl bands in particular, they tend to appeal to teenagers a generation or so younger than them. This means that the audience are likely to look up to the artist. Therefore, we decided that we were going to target predominantly females (and additionally males) that were slightly younger than us. The below diagrams identify our core and secondary audiences in more detail:

Our core audience was 13-18 year old females.

Our secondary audience was 13-18 year old males.

We based the generalizations made in the diagrams above on real people we interviewed in the research and planning process, for example Alicia's brother, Emily's sister and Olivia's friend Patrick. We then used their characteristics to create a core and secondary audience that we felt we could target most effectively.

Post-Production

On Monday the 20th of January, we held a screening in our school's studio. About 70 people came along to support us and enjoy their viewing of what they knew we had been working on. Instead of handing out paper surveys, we created one on an online platform called survey monkey. This way it was easier to organize it and people themselves had to do the action of clicking on the link - it was not us bringing the survey to them. Therefore, each response was serious and detailed. Although family and friend opinions may have been biased, the opinions of acquaintances and strangers were not and by us sending a link out for example on facebook or twitter, they also had access to the survey. Therefore, it was not just our target audience who filled in the survey, but age brackets younger and older than this also. This increased the validity of our results. However, we kept in mind that it is mainly people of our age who use social media/computers and would have had access to the link so it couldn't be representative of every demographic.

As you can see, we included both open and closed questions. This allowed us to collect data that was easy to present on a graph whilst still getting in depth information about people's opinions. Therefore we could analyse the data to an optimum level. The below prezi quotes some of the comments we received within the survey:

As you can see, we got some interesting feedback from the people we questioned. We noticed that the things that continually came up for people’s likes (such as hair and make-up and the humour) were the things we generally invested the most effort into as we believed they would draw in our target audience. Therefore, we believe we managed to target our audience well within our video. We were even pleased with the dislikes because as they were so contradicting between each person (for example some people thought the breakdown was too dramatic, some people thought we could make it even more dramatic), it consolidated that these dislikes were a matter of personal opinion rather than a problem with our video. Something that was also critiqued was the acting, in hindsight we could have practised our instrument performances on camera in the research and planning stage and watched it back to see what we could improve about our performances. We were pleasantly surprised by what people thought the message of the video was, as more people than we expected got the point immediately that female artists and satire don’t necessarily mix within the industry and that we were challenging this. However, some people also formed a literal connection between the visuals and the lyrics – ‘they are not sleeping, they are having fun’.

We have some of our closed questions converted into visual representations. This has allowed us to analyse the data with ease:

We also wanted more specific audience feedback from a male and female member of our target audiences. Therefore we interviewed our friends Alex (17) and Anna (18), for the main purpose of seeing a reaction to our website and album cover, but also for an opinion on whether they worked together as a brand. This interview is down below:

Overall, we believe that the audience feedback we received was put to good use and helped us create the music video we did. Keeping our target audience in mind through out the process was essential to making sure we were continually basing our decisions on what would appeal to them.