Target Audience - Oliver

Research Into Target Audience

The target audience for my trailer is the traditional target audience of 15-35 years old. This covers the key demographic for our film and also hits the most prized media audience demographic as these are the people who are assumed to consume most media as they don’t have big financial responsibilities and have time.

This google search:

Google Search

shows that if you google "who watches psychological thrillers", a common entry is a list of best films - the fact that there are so many of these suggest that they are very popular films. Having looked at some of these lists, the majority of films included are from 2000s suggesting a youngish compiler, so this backs up the idea that these films are popular with a young audience.

My film is non-gender specific as it has an appeal for both genders. Male viewers may enjoy the action and suspense sequences and female viewers may enjoy the psychological drama. There is often a strong female character in these dramas to help this appeal.

This article by a film writer / producer explains his target audience for his own psychological thriller and his target audience. This highlights the importance of the female market and also of the older market, who are maybe more important than people realise.

http://www.johnfurse.co.uk/marketability.html#audience


However, these are big gender generalisations and Ang suggests that this kind of targeting is no longer accurate and a VALs approach is better. This is why he believes that target audiences are based on tastes. This means that according to Ang, the people watching my film should like movies which include drama and a puzzle and you have to keep watching to work out the puzzle. This is the enigma code as identified by the theorist Barthes and this has an interest that is not relevant to gender, age, social class etc, but more to personal tastes.

The theorist Fiske says that target audiences do not exist as everyone is an individual and no one has the exact same view on something. With so much choice now available and so much content for niche audiences, producers are now chasing audiences rather than one mass audience as before. He feels that everyone thinks something different and there is no longer such a thing as target audience as there is such a wide range to choose from. However, I think that there is still some audience profiling that is possible. For example, we think that our film has more appeal to a younger age group because of the age of the characters and therefore the actors involved.

The theorists Blumler and Katz think that the audience is ‘caught’ through gratifications; entertainment, escapism, self-worth and social bonding are key gratifications for our film. Our movie will have entertainment because people will enjoy it and they will find it fun to watch. It will have escapism because it will get you so drawn into the puzzle; you will forget about the outside world and only be focusing on the movie. It will give you a chance for social bonding as you can go to watch the movie with friends. There is also an appeal in films which are challenging and have complex plots, as ours does. On this poll, the majority of responders said they actively enjoyed being confused by a film:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20121202070355AAhvQU0

Silverstone is another theorist who talks about the target audience. He says that we watch these days in 3 ways; consumption (watching), play (making believe in the reality) and performance (interacting). My film will have consumption due to its huge promotional campaign. There will be websites set up for it and it will also be on social networking sites which will hit the play element. It will involve play as we are going to make the world of the texts seem real by creating games, and having interviews with the actors pretending to be the characters. It will have performance as I will allow for fan fiction to be posted and people will be making Youtube mash ups of my end product. In this way, our overall campaign allows audiences to consume the film in more than one way.