EVALUATION QUESTION FOUR

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience of our media product refers to the target audience, this is the group of people that is most ideal for our media product. The characteristics of a target audience can include age, gender, occupation, household income, marital status, presence of children in the household, home value and geographic regions. Every product that is made in the media has a target audience, whether they are for an ethnic audience, a certain age group or a gender group. Using the example of ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ the target audience would be young girls aged 14+ this would be because the emotion and topics of this film are more suited for the female audience, it would also be because girls younger than 14 would not fully understand the topics that are dealt with in our film.

After discussion amongst our group, we all decided that we would aim our media piece at people aged 15 up to 30. We decided to choose this age range because we felt that the story line in our film was most suited for those of this age, as it deals with many different kinds of emotional topics, including illness, friendship and loss. We decided on choosing people in their teens as we thought that they would be able to relate to the friendship side of this film and as the characters in our film are also teenagers, we felt that this age range would be able to relate to the storyline better. We also decided on aiming our film on those older than teenagers because we felt that they would be able to relate to the illness and more emotional side of this film. As this film can be closely linked to romantic drama films such as ‘The Notebook’ we felt that target audiences for these sorts of films would enjoy this film as they both involve emotional subjects. We did not feel comfortable with making our target audience age any higher as we felt that any people of a higher age would not be particularly appealed by our film, its genre and the topics included. We also felt that they would not be able to relate to the age range in our film as well as 30 year olds. We also didn’t want to lower the age of our target audience because we felt that a younger audience would not particularly understand the storyline of our film and we also felt that the emotional trauma experienced in this film would not be appropriate for anyone younger than 15. We didn’t believe that anybody younger than 15 would be able to relate to the lives of 17 year olds either. However, we decided to make our film a 12 because after looking at age classifications we felt that our film didn’t contain enough for it to be a 15. After looking at the features of a 12 film, we felt that our film would be more suited to this classification, but we have still aimed our media product at those aged 15+

Our target audience is also mainly females. This is because we felt that females would be more sympathetic towards the topics that were felt in our film. Genres closely linked with our own such as romantic dramas and rom com films are also aimed at mainly females so we felt that females would be able to relate to the topics a little more and would feel more sympathetic towards the emotional topics experienced in this film. For example, the topic of cancer is more associated with females as they are stereotypically more sympathetic towards the topic of illness and disease, we also felt that females would be able to relate more to the topic of cancer because of the awareness raised on the topic of breast cancer in reality, we believed that females would be able to relate more to this topic. We also chose to aim our film at females because the majority of characters shown in the film are females, as this film deals with the friendship between two teenage girls we felt that females would be able to relate to the issues that occur between the two characters. We decided not to aim our film at males as we felt that they would stereotypically be more interested in action or thriller films, as this film features neither of the two, we felt that this film would be inappropriate for males. However, there may be a small minority of males that may enjoy this film, as some males might have different interests and may be able to relate better to the topic of cancer better than stereotypical males. However, this is a niche audience and a small minority so we felt that it wouldn’t be worth including them in our target audience.

These are the characteristics of our ideal audience:
– 15 years +
– Mainly females but some males might enjoy it, it doesn’t particularly matter
– Enjoys drama films
– Can be sympathetic towards certain emotions
– Enjoys films that can make you cry and feel strong emotions
– Watches a lot of television and watches soap operas, such as Eastenders, Hollyoaks and Coronation Street

This picture shows our ideal audience, these are a group of girls that we believe would most enjoy our film. They are aged 16-17 and mostly enjoy drama and action films. These girls watch quite a lot of television and take a particular interest in programmes such as Waterloo Road and Eastenders. They also watch programmes such as The Only Way is Essex and other programmes of that sort of genre. They also like to go to the cinema for social gatherings and mostly enjoy films such as My Sister’s Keeper, Slumdog Millionaire and Harry Potter. As these girls are also over the age of 15, they would be able to go see our film as they are of the correct age and will want to go and see our film.