Arianna Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We tried to get as much audience feedback throughout the project as possible. We decided that our target audience would be British females aged 15-45, with our secondary audience extending to males of the same category and tertiary being foreign non-English language speakers. However, in the midst of our project we realised that targeting the tertiary audience would be unrealistic with a small independent record label. We decided to focus on the primary and secondary after this thought.

We needed to take into account Katz and Blumler's theory of the key uses and gratifications of media products when trying to target our audience. Our video was definitely entertaining, but I feel that it would have been difficult for the audience to identify with the characters in it. However, this provided an alternative interesting effect as it could have been considered confusing and intriguing. It definitely enhanced social interaction, with people talking about the music videos for days in school. Some went as far as saying they “want to create [their] own music video now”. Finally, I think the video definitely provided an escape from daily life. From watching reactions in the screening we held, everyone seemed hooked on the narrative.

As a group, we created an online questionnaire with SurveyMonkey, an online web tool, as it was an easy way of getting feedback from friends in the form of quantative data and collating it all in one place. We all shared the link via Facebook and we received over 50 responses. Social media platforms were extremely useful when targeting our young, modern and technological audience. Here is a video I created going through the results:

Alice and I also held a focus group with friends who would be in both the primary and secondary target audience. This is a video of their responses to the questions we asked:

After learning about Stuart Hall's theory of 'preferred and negociated meaning' I understood that all of our texts are polysemic. There is no one way of looking at things which is why every audience member interpreted the music video differently. Our hospital set up was inspired by old depictions of a psychiatric hospital, for example that in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. We had to be wary that with negotiated meaning, this could be interpreted as offensive. However, from our audience feedback we established that this was not the case.

It was necessary to get audience feedback on our ancillary tasks. Again, social media was a perfect was of doing this. I sent an image of the album cover and a link to the website to a few friends and this is an example of the feedback I received: