1B - Audience Essay Question UPDATED

Apply the use of audience to your media production

The audience refers to the people we researched, targeted and marketed our product towards. In our case, our audience was fun loving teenage girls who are independent and happy teenage girls. Our music was going to be very pop styled and therefore our target audience was going to be middle class girls, preppy and happy. Our band was going to produce feel good music so we knew our audience had to be people that really wanted to be free and joyous. Straight away we knew we wanted to produce a music video that appealed to a younger audience as we wanted to be role models for the younger people in society. We noticed that there weren’t any current role models within the music industry, who don’t bare skin to gain views in their music videos or who promote friendship and fun.

Whilst researching into theorists we came across Andrew Goodwin and chose to include a lot of his influences. We include multiple close ups with a plain wooden back ground to that our faces really stood out the camera, as well as shots including all three of us (like on the log pile right at the start of the video) so that it was clear that we were a band. For this idea, we conformed completely yet we also subverted his ideas of voyeurism as we felt it wasn’t the image that we wanted to bring across. As a group, we decided that wanted to challenge the idea that women have to bare skin to produce a successful music video. This makes younger generations feel it is normal to women to succeed that way and makes them feel as though talent is all about looks, which is completely wrong. Therefore, we made sure we wore normal clothes that looked edgy yet covered up our assets in addition to focusing more on our fun laughing faces to that we brought up the mood of our audience. Subverting Goodwin’s theory by proving the audience do not need to feel lust towards the video for it to be successful.

Once we figured out that our audience was going to be 12-20-year-old girls we looked more into their demographics and what interests them, also known as psychographic profiling. This brought up that 71% of teens use more than one social media. As well as the widespread and improved mobile technology means teens can access social media more easily. We noticed that teens now use social media to escape which is a concept we wanted to include with our music. As though they could listen to our song and it would completely bring up their mood. According to a Pew survey conducted during 2014 and 2015, 94 percent of teens who go online using a mobile device do so daily. This information clearly told us that to truly reach our audience, our main source of publicising would be through social media. We created a snapchat and Instagram account to appeal to the younger teen girls as this makes it easier for them to follow us. Similarly, we created a fun and professional twitter account and Facebook page, to inform the older teen girls about what our band was doing and would be releasing in the coming months. Our research also gave us indications to show girls are very cautious about image and fitting in with clicks. Therefore, to appeal to their interests we made our social media slick, so that the teen girls wanted to be our friend whilst subconsciously making them want to be a happy fun loving just like the pictures and posts made us appear. The profiling also leads to us following the stereotypical pastel pink girly colours for our logo, digipak and website as we knew it would subconsciously attract in the young girly girl teens we wanted in our target audience as we were someone they wanted to be.

We have published our video on Vimeo and YouTube as well as on all of our social medias and our website. 12-20- year old girls are very focused on the internet and this is how they find their entertainment, news, gossip and communicate. Because of this we knew producing an interview would mean that our fans could really get to know us and inevitably then connect without music video. It meant that our audience could relate to our interests and find out facts about our day to day life’s, as if they were our friends. We allowed fans to ask questions and it meant we could bring more of our personalities across. This interview was then posted on our website and a like was posted on all of our social medias so that we had the highest exposure possible.

When creating our overall band image, we used Stuart Halls encoding theories. We tool all of the positive attributes of a teenage girl, fun, polite, enjoyable, excited, and maximised them to replace the bad mainstream views and attempt to replace them with a new ‘dominant message’. We also enforced this by having numerous shots with one of the girls in the centre, to promote independence and uniqueness. Telling our young teenage girls watching that they too need to aspire to be independent and proud of themselves.

the themes used such as the pink colours and the pastel balloons we also linked in to our digipak and website. We chose to use pictures from the sets of our shots. This made it clear to the audience that each of our products related to the other and promoted us as a whole brand image. It also incorporated Goodwin’s idea of promoting the artists faces as it meant that we were seen in all of our products. Much like the music video we knew we had to plaster these all over social media so that they would be seen by our audience and therefore added links to our website in all of or bios on our pages as well as having the digipak as our header on twitter and Facebook, promoting all of our products as well as our brand. We didn’t want to simple promote just ‘a band’ so therefore produced tour dates which we included in the website. As we were a band just starting off we also wanted to start a great founding for our fan base, so included contact information so that they could email us questions and we were really able to connect with each other.

We felt that all of our research helped us to produce a great country pop music video that is recognisable to its ancillary products as well as making our audience feel happy motivated and unique. Focusing on being yourself really allowed teenage girls to embrace the video and aspire to find their happiness. Proving that being a nice person with a talent is more worthwhile than using your body to get you places in the world. Overall showing we used our knowledge of our audience to our advantage to make sure our video would be successful and liked by the public.