Sophia Bendo Media Evaluation - Question Three

"What have you learned from your audience feedback?"

In order to best represent our target audience, we created a fictitious audience member named Dave. We then used his fictional demographics and pyschographics in order to create a video which would appeal to our target audience. Our fictional audience member Dave is a 22 year old male from London who enjoys clubbing, these demographics are typical of the House genre audience. 

Therefore in order to appeal to this target audience, the main protagonist in our music video is an attractive young female and close up shots of her face and body are frequent. This adheres to Andrew Goodwin's Six Point Analysis Theory (Dancing In The Distraction Factory, Routledge, 1992), we have deliberately used an attractive female in order to increase the video's attractiveness to male audiences. 

We also conducted research using the Broadcasters Audience Research Board website, www.barb.co.uk in order to find out which music channels are currently available and which channels would be most appropriate platforms to display our music video.

Our song choice, "Aspirin", is a classic house track so therefore the video would only feature on music channels, which play house music and other dance genres. This research enabled us to identify several music channels which would be appropriate platforms to display our media product. These channels were Clubland TV, which has an average daily reach of 142,000 viewers, 4Music with an average daily reach of 1,396,000 viewers and Viva which has an average daily reach of 1,555,000 viewers. Other channels which were suitable for our media product are Dance Nation which has an average daily reach of 86,000 viewers and MTV Dance with an average daily reach of 166,000 viewers. 

Viva is the most music popular channel on air with an average daily reach of 1,555,000 therefore if we were marketing the media product, in order to reach the widest possible audience it would be essential that the video was played on channels such as Viva. 

Our research helped us identify music channels which would not be appropriate for our media product, namely Scuzz and Channel AKA. This channels only cater to extremely niche genres of music such as hardcore rock and grime and therefore would not display our music video.

We also researched suitable platforms other than music channels which would be able to promote both the media product and the ancillary texts, the magazine advert and digipak. We have alreafdy established that House is a niche genre and therefore mainstream publications would not be appropriate, after taking this into the consideration as well as the hobbies and interests of our fictional audience member Dave, we realised that it would be best to research publications related to dance music, clubbing and DJ'ing.

Two suitable publications for this were Mixmag and DjMag. Mixmag is a British electronic dance music and clubbing magazine which claims to be "the world's biggest selling dance music magazine" In 2010 Mixmag had an audited circulation of approximately 21,250 copies.

DJ Mag is a British monthly magazine dedicated to Electronic Dance Music (EDM) and DJ's. It is a music-led publication containing club reviews, interviews and

features on DJ's. The magazine has a yearly circulation of around 12,321 copies.

We created fictional quotes from both magazines to use on our magazine advert, as shown below.

Initially we conducted a survey on our classmates, canvassing our key ideas for our media product. We asked 10 questions, these questions were:

1. Are you male or female?
2. What is your favourite genre of music?
3. Do you prefer songs with lyrics or instrumental tracks?
4. Are you familiar with the "House" genre?
5. If so, who is your favourite artist with this genre?
6. Do you think music videos are most effective when they are conceptual, narrative or performance based?
7. Are you familiar with the silent film genre?
8. In your opinion, would an entirely black and white video be effective?
9. Do you regularly watch music channels?
10. If so, which three do you watch most often?

We decided to quantify the results for the questions that we felt were most important in the form of bar graphs and pie charts.

As the female members in our class greatly outnumber the number of males, we expected the feedback to be very different. As expected, some of the male responses were very different to the female responses.



This was a very important question as despite having shortlisted possible songs, we hadn't completely decided which song to choose for our media product, we had a mixture of lyrical and instrumental songs so this question helped us guage the preferences of our peers. Interestingly, although songs with lyrics were the clear favourite in this survey, we decided to contradict this audience response and choose an instrumental songs. We weren't orginally sure if this was the best decision to make, however when we presented the rough cut of the media product to classmates, the positive comments about the song choice proved we had made the right choice.

This question was also highly important. In class we had watched several examples of conceptual, narrative and performanced based elements and all three styles appealed us. We chose to rule out a performance based video as unlike in a Rock music video where the band would be able to perform the song, artists in the house genre create their music electronically using computer or DJ software so essentially it cannot be 'performed' as effectively in a music video. Also, another convention of this genre is that artists rarely feature in their videos so again this restricted what we could do with a performance based video. The results of the survey shows that they felt narrative based videos were strongest so we used this response to our advantage and created a media product which is mainly narrative, there is a clear narrative pattern in that it follows a young girl as she tries to make her way home. However, there are also non-linear elements to the video, namely montages and split screens.

"Black and white went well, liked the story line"

"Video - great idea - needs tightening"

An entirely black and white was an idea we'd envisioned from the beginning but we weren't how audiences would react to it, the survey clarified this, our classmates felt that a black and white video would be effective. This was also evident in the feedback from the viewing of the rough cut

"I liked the fact that the video was shot in black and white - locations were good "

"Black and white went well, liked the story line"

"Like the black and white"

Audience feedback was also instrumental in our final design choices for the magazine advert and digipak. We showed classmates several of our design ideas and moodboards which we had used for inspiration.

The feedback we received from this was mainly positive,

"Like the pill idea for album cover, maybe also in black or white

"I like the underground sign for the album cover, but the writing as the same font as the actual underground sign

"Like the black and white, like the underground cover"

"Good covers, needs developing - ideas are there "

"Make sure you find good links between your video and album cover ie. Dont put aspirin in the cover just because its called Aspirin"

We used these criticisms and ideas to help us perfect our final designs for the magazine advert and digipak. As the black and white was so popular we stuck to this, this is a key element of our branding and the audience is able to recognise the aesthetic link between the media product and ancillary texts.

We moved away slightly from the underground sign idea, we still wanted to represent it but in a more subtle way so instead we used a picture of the station, with the underground sign, clearly visible.

Please visit my multimedia evaluation at Wix.Com

http://www.wix.com/sophiaelbendo/mymediaevaluation