Audience And My Production

Target Audience is decisive

As 'Hall and Holmes’ have explained through their quote in 1998 ‘Any Media text is created for particular audience and will usually appeal most to this particular audience,’ a target audience affects the media language and techniques applied by a production team in order to cater for there needs.

When a media product is launched there needs to be a lot of consideration towards audience because that is the primary purpose of any film, there is a lot of work done on the commercial aspect and how well the product will satisfy the audience’s hierarchy of needs. So in order to provide the right content for my audience I will have to get the right ideologies of a slasher Horror trailer. There are different types of audiences one of which is ‘Mass audience’, my film does not cater for a mass audience as it is not a mainstream genre but can be appreciated by the ‘Mass audience’ stereotype, which is made up of working class people. The audience I will be catering for are considered more ‘Niche’ but are not upper class citizens as my Survey Monkey results prove that my audience are of a slightly low social class and generally low paid workers with a few exceptions. These results can be justified on the NRS (National Readership Survey), my audiences tend to have a social grade of E or D.

Audience profiling can prove effective when producing products for the media market, by having the knowledge of your audiences gender, age, demographic and profile you can configure a stereotype audience. For my trailer my gender is identified as males and I will continue to make this gender the appeal by showing male dominant characters. Age of my audience is considered between the ages of 16-24, as many are low skilled workers or students, by showing characters in the film that age they can find someone to relate to in the film. For my production and me it is hard to figure a demographic for my audience, as that sort of research is quite a way out of my budget. So I think the most important and strategic decision to make is to give my characters a mutual region accent and not make any particular dialects stand out so I have bigger overall appeal.

Developing lifestyle marketing has also become a more popular technique through the years as it offers more terms, values, attitudes and beliefs to be added to it. At this current time there are ten current categories. The categories that can be applied to my audience are the ‘Tribe Wired’ group and also the ‘Fun/Antics’ they both follow the characteristics of digital, spirited, aspirational, creative and fun seeking. So by targeting this type of audience particularly when producing my media text and I can market very successfully and receive a good critical reception.

Ideologies need to be well thought out when taking part in production, as Marx claims ‘dominant ideologies are those that already underpin society.’ So by supporting certain ideologies in my trailer I can ‘underpin’ a good audience. By making sure I cast characters that follow the male hero character type I will be able to draw in a female audience who are attentive towards the male. By doing this furthermore I will stick to a common ideology that slasher films use by showing good looking characters to try and overcome the antagonist.

By referring back to this and other media texts I can create a successful production in terms of my audiences wants.