Research into Target Audiences and How to Attract Them
Active Audiences
Active audience theories suggest that the audience is participating in the action of consuming text. They are not messages ‘encoded’ in text for the audience to ‘decode’. Instead, through consuming the text, meaning is encoded in the interaction between the text and the audience. Therefore the meaning belongs to the audience. This is quite important for our kind of psychological thriller, where we depend a lot on the audience doing a lot of the work and making their own interpretations. Many people found Inception confusing, but this added to rather than detracted from its appeal. The beginning of this article suggests that being clear on what happens would actually spoil the fun:
http://collider.com/inception-christopher-nolan-explains/61972/
There is a feeling of pride in being able to understand the film, and even audiences who were confused seem to enjoy the confusion as these comments suggest:
http://uaddit.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=15123
Active audience theories suggest that the audience is participating in the action of consuming text. They are not messages ‘encoded’ in text for the audience to ‘decode’. Instead, through consuming the text, meaning is encoded in the interaction between the text and the audience. Therefore the meaning belongs to the audience. This is quite important for our kind of psychological thriller, where we depend a lot on the audience doing a lot of the work and making their own interpretations. Many people found Inception confusing, but this added to rather than detracted from its appeal. The beginning of this article suggests that being clear on what happens would actually spoil the fun:
http://collider.com/inception-christopher-nolan-explains/61972/
There is a feeling of pride in being able to understand the film, and even audiences who were confused seem to enjoy the confusion as these comments suggest:
http://uaddit.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=15123
So I would argue that there is a market for complex films where the difference between dream, reality and drugged halluciation is difficult to work out.
Context of Consumption
According to Morley’s Reception Theory, meanings vary with the individual. He interviewed a large audience on the meanings they had got out of watching the same episode of the Nationwide programme and found the influence a text has on a person is affected by the context of production and the audience’s context of consumption, where you are, who are you with and how you are feeling at the time of consumption. Therefore each individual feels differently towards a film because of their tastes, which is why we have target audiences, but also because of how they consume the film. If the individual were to watch a film in a cold, dirty room, on their own and whilst they feel unwell it’s unlikely they will enjoy the film.
For us, this means that when we are trying to identify our audience, we need to think about the context of consumption. Watching a trailer on the internet is a different experience to watching in a crowded cinema. Therefore our promotional campaign needs to take into account where we release our products. As the main trailer we are making is intended for the cinema, we need it to be loud and dramatic to catch the audience who have come to see a different film and might not be settled or might walk in half way through. Therefore we need dramatic shots and loud, energetic music to catch attention. This is why trailers rely on a combination of dialogue and voiceover and strong visuals - often the same basic information is being given because this way you get your message over to the audience who is half-watching and the audience who is half-listening.
However, we also need to make sure our trailer rewards audiences watching online. This is likely to be a more peaceful experience and they might even watch several times. We therefore need to have a variety of shots so there is always something new to notice.
Target Audience
Fiske argues that target audiences don’t exist. He suggests that audience profiling has become pointless and that demographics are almost irrelevant to audience tastes these days as audiences are now fragmented and diverse. There is too much of a wide range in difference in taste that it can’t be put into big groups. There is too much choice to have big target audiences. If we were to look at taking the traditional demographic approach for our film, we would probably aim for a target audience age ranging from 15 to 35. I think our film does not have a specific gender preference as although the main character is a girl which would appeal to females, the plot of the film could be appealing to males also. We have a lot of action, drama and psychological tension which should appeal to all.
Ang, however, suggests Fiske is too extreme and all media producers try to ‘package’ their audiences to a certain extent. Otherwise selling the film would become extremely difficult as you wouldn’t know around who you are selling it too. However, he does agree that it’s become harder to use the demographic approach- it’s becoming old fashioned. It’s not easier to use the VALs (values, attitudes, lifestyle) approach, where the audience is targeted based on taste rather age and gender. If we were to base our target audience on the VALs approach, we would be targeting individuals that enjoy films with an enigma code (a puzzle they have to solve) as they would be trying to figure out who the murderer in the film is, and drama as the film involves this also. We are also thinking about a wide adult audience who do not want to see too much extreme violence but like to be involved in the film.
This female writer / blogger tries to analyse here why psychological thrillers appeal to her. The poll she conducts suggest they are the most popular sub-genre of the thriller genre:
http://rebeccaberto.com/tag/thriller/
I think a lot of her comments would apply to many fans of the genre and explains its popular appeal and why it does not alienate a female audience.
Audience Activity
Fiske sees the consumer/producer relationship as a conflict. Producers try to determine our tastes by what they provide. Therefore the audience can only select what their taste is from what is provided by producers. Fiske argues that we determine what becomes popular, and we tend to choose products that we can ‘resist’ and create our own meanings from. Therefore he is suggesting we like products where there is not a definite meaning to the story so we can create our own version of what the story means to fit our individual personal needs. This is how we drift into ‘fan’ pursuits such as mash ups, fanfiction etc. Jenkins argues that today’s consumption is active and creative. The audience goes beyond the film itself when consuming and creates a world outside the film they can live through. Our intended promotional campaign has a social networking element which allows audiences to interact. We would also expect the creation of alternative trailers on YouTube etc.
According to Morley’s Reception Theory, meanings vary with the individual. He interviewed a large audience on the meanings they had got out of watching the same episode of the Nationwide programme and found the influence a text has on a person is affected by the context of production and the audience’s context of consumption, where you are, who are you with and how you are feeling at the time of consumption. Therefore each individual feels differently towards a film because of their tastes, which is why we have target audiences, but also because of how they consume the film. If the individual were to watch a film in a cold, dirty room, on their own and whilst they feel unwell it’s unlikely they will enjoy the film.
For us, this means that when we are trying to identify our audience, we need to think about the context of consumption. Watching a trailer on the internet is a different experience to watching in a crowded cinema. Therefore our promotional campaign needs to take into account where we release our products. As the main trailer we are making is intended for the cinema, we need it to be loud and dramatic to catch the audience who have come to see a different film and might not be settled or might walk in half way through. Therefore we need dramatic shots and loud, energetic music to catch attention. This is why trailers rely on a combination of dialogue and voiceover and strong visuals - often the same basic information is being given because this way you get your message over to the audience who is half-watching and the audience who is half-listening.
However, we also need to make sure our trailer rewards audiences watching online. This is likely to be a more peaceful experience and they might even watch several times. We therefore need to have a variety of shots so there is always something new to notice.
Target Audience
Fiske argues that target audiences don’t exist. He suggests that audience profiling has become pointless and that demographics are almost irrelevant to audience tastes these days as audiences are now fragmented and diverse. There is too much of a wide range in difference in taste that it can’t be put into big groups. There is too much choice to have big target audiences. If we were to look at taking the traditional demographic approach for our film, we would probably aim for a target audience age ranging from 15 to 35. I think our film does not have a specific gender preference as although the main character is a girl which would appeal to females, the plot of the film could be appealing to males also. We have a lot of action, drama and psychological tension which should appeal to all.
Ang, however, suggests Fiske is too extreme and all media producers try to ‘package’ their audiences to a certain extent. Otherwise selling the film would become extremely difficult as you wouldn’t know around who you are selling it too. However, he does agree that it’s become harder to use the demographic approach- it’s becoming old fashioned. It’s not easier to use the VALs (values, attitudes, lifestyle) approach, where the audience is targeted based on taste rather age and gender. If we were to base our target audience on the VALs approach, we would be targeting individuals that enjoy films with an enigma code (a puzzle they have to solve) as they would be trying to figure out who the murderer in the film is, and drama as the film involves this also. We are also thinking about a wide adult audience who do not want to see too much extreme violence but like to be involved in the film.
This female writer / blogger tries to analyse here why psychological thrillers appeal to her. The poll she conducts suggest they are the most popular sub-genre of the thriller genre:
http://rebeccaberto.com/tag/thriller/
I think a lot of her comments would apply to many fans of the genre and explains its popular appeal and why it does not alienate a female audience.
Audience Activity
Fiske sees the consumer/producer relationship as a conflict. Producers try to determine our tastes by what they provide. Therefore the audience can only select what their taste is from what is provided by producers. Fiske argues that we determine what becomes popular, and we tend to choose products that we can ‘resist’ and create our own meanings from. Therefore he is suggesting we like products where there is not a definite meaning to the story so we can create our own version of what the story means to fit our individual personal needs. This is how we drift into ‘fan’ pursuits such as mash ups, fanfiction etc. Jenkins argues that today’s consumption is active and creative. The audience goes beyond the film itself when consuming and creates a world outside the film they can live through. Our intended promotional campaign has a social networking element which allows audiences to interact. We would also expect the creation of alternative trailers on YouTube etc.
Silverstone suggests that consumption is a mediated experience that can take three forms:
Consumption- this is the ordinary, everyday act of watching a film.
Play- this is an act of participation in a make-believe situation. The audience actively involves themselves- they like to make believe that the world of the text is true.
Performance- here the act of participation becomes real. For example, when the audience participates in creating fanfiction and YouTube remix clips. Silverstone argues that play and performance are becoming more popular that consumption. Therefore the film itself is becoming less important; it’s more about playing with the story and becoming part of it. So, when thinking about target audience for our film we also need to think about where they can take the story and how they can involve themselves. This means that the trailer has to leave big questions, and has to make the audience really engage with the main character so they are tempted to look up her Facebook profile, read more about her on the film website etc.
User Theories
‘User rather than consumer’ theories, however, suggest that we use media rather than consume it. We have a set of ‘pleasures’ that we have identified and we use media texts to gain these pleasures for ourselves.
Blumler and Katz said we watch texts for what we can get out of them. We use them for: information (what we can get out of them), learning (to improve and educate ourselves), personal identity (to work out who you are and what you stand for), integration and social interaction (to discuss texts with other people) and entertainment (for fun/escapism/pleasure).This is what gets us addicted to film, we almost need it to make ourselves feel and become better- to interact with others and escape from our problems.
Furthermore, we need to take these things into consideration when thinking about our target audience and what will attract them. We need to think about which of these pleasures or uses and gratifications will be involved in our film and then target those who enjoy them. For example, the audience should achieve integration and social interaction from our film as they will be able to discuss it with other people. It will also involve entertainment as it allows them to get escape from their personal problems and get engrossed in the film’s story instead. They will also be pleasured voyeuristically as the audience will see something secret like the girl’s drink being spiked, that the girl does not know herself and so is positioned as a spy.
There is a suggestion that these films are exploitative which is touched on in this article:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/millennial-media/201210/what-makes-film-psychological-thriller
This suggests that our film could portray serious mental disturbance in a less than thoughtful way, just for a thrill; and we also don't go deeply into our murderer's feelings / reasons. However, as the writer says, this is common for the genre and is what makes these films enjoyable to watch. As long as our audience do not take the film too seriously it should not do great harm.
‘User rather than consumer’ theories, however, suggest that we use media rather than consume it. We have a set of ‘pleasures’ that we have identified and we use media texts to gain these pleasures for ourselves.
Blumler and Katz said we watch texts for what we can get out of them. We use them for: information (what we can get out of them), learning (to improve and educate ourselves), personal identity (to work out who you are and what you stand for), integration and social interaction (to discuss texts with other people) and entertainment (for fun/escapism/pleasure).This is what gets us addicted to film, we almost need it to make ourselves feel and become better- to interact with others and escape from our problems.
Furthermore, we need to take these things into consideration when thinking about our target audience and what will attract them. We need to think about which of these pleasures or uses and gratifications will be involved in our film and then target those who enjoy them. For example, the audience should achieve integration and social interaction from our film as they will be able to discuss it with other people. It will also involve entertainment as it allows them to get escape from their personal problems and get engrossed in the film’s story instead. They will also be pleasured voyeuristically as the audience will see something secret like the girl’s drink being spiked, that the girl does not know herself and so is positioned as a spy.
There is a suggestion that these films are exploitative which is touched on in this article:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/millennial-media/201210/what-makes-film-psychological-thriller
This suggests that our film could portray serious mental disturbance in a less than thoughtful way, just for a thrill; and we also don't go deeply into our murderer's feelings / reasons. However, as the writer says, this is common for the genre and is what makes these films enjoyable to watch. As long as our audience do not take the film too seriously it should not do great harm.
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