Who would be the audience for your media product? (Task 4)

To work out our target audience for our thrillers we filmed 12 interviews with people of different ages and genders, 2 in each age group. The groups were: 

1. Boys 15-20
2. Girls 15-20
3. Man 21-39
4. Woman 21-39
5. Man 40+
6. Woman 40+

In the interviews we asked each person 6 questions, 3 were simple closed questions so that I could easily place the data into graphs. And the other 3 were broad open questions that I explained and analysed. 

The 3 closed questions were:

1. How old are you?
2. What is your favourite film genre?
3. Do you like or dislike thrillers?

The answers to these questions could be easily analysed and placed in graphs. 

The 3 open broad questions were:

1. Why do you like/dislike thrillers?
2. Who do you watch thrillers with?
3. How do you feel after having watched a thriller?

I later described the answers to these questions because it is not possible to explain these answers on a graph.

If I had more time I would like to have interviewed more people from each age group. Due to the small sample size the data is limited and doesn't give a clear representation of the different demographics.

Below is a series of slide showing and explaining my process in researching, analysing and concluding my target audience. 

Below is a video of the interviews that we conducted in order to find out our target audience. Two of the people we interviewed did not want to be included in the video, however they gave us permission to use their results and data in the analysis and conclusion. 

Video of our interviews

Below is the data collected from interviews which I placed on a bar chart

These are the findings concluded from the interviews which I briefly analysed. 

I then broke down the film genre preferences of all the males and females in the study

When asked "When having to watch a thriller who do you watch them with?", three of the males responded by saying they watch them alone, the main reason was because their family or friends do not like watching thrillers, therefore they watch them alone. The other three males said they watch them with their friends, family or spouse. 

Whereas for the females asked 5 out of the 6 said they watched them with friends and family whilst only 1 said they watched them alone. 

When asked "How do you feel after watching a thriller?"

The majority of the answers were "It depends on how the film was, if its a good thriller then it can make you feel scared or shocked, but if it's a bad film then you feel disappointed"

A lot of the answers revolved around the same point, that their level of satisfaction depended on the quality of the thriller and plot. 

One popular adjective used was "thrilled!". The reason so many people don't have a definite answer on how they feel after having watched a thriller may be because there are many sub-genre's within the 'Thriller' genre and due to its wide spectrum of films, it has become an overused genre of film, causing the plot-lines and conventions to have become cliched. Therefore, audiences have become very wary when choosing to watch a thriller. 

As part of the evaluation I created a social media profile on Facebook of our target audience. It is of a middle aged man, with interest and social media posts that reflect our target audience and a mock profile of someone that would see our film.

As you can see our target audience 'Robert' is born March 14th 1970, making him 45 years old, fitting within the 40+ age range.

I used landscape photos that I took to use for the cover art and a free stock image of a middle aged man for the profile picture. 

I also wrote a post on the film 'Psycho' to show his intrigue in thrillers.

I also wrote a short intro of his favourite things, the have a better insight into our target audience.

On 'Robert's page I chose some of his likes, being a man who is in his mid 40's I chose music that reflected the music genre's prevalent during his upbringing. I also chose a lot of rock bands because I thought that stereo-typically people who like, eccentric and aggressive music would also like to watch deep, dark and interesting thrillers. 

 I also wrote posts of him asking "Friends, whats the song in the scene where buffalo bill is dressed as a woman and dancing in the room?" this shows that he has an interest in psychological thrillers (just like ours). It also makes him look like a realistic person, because most of peoples posts are either statement or question based.

I also made him sound older by posting "I love this Facebook" which is not how most young people talk when discussing social media. Additionally, the post included photos from the film 'Memento' another psychological thriller. This further shows his interest into films that are similar to the genre of our thriller. 

To further emphasis his older age, I posted a photo of a dog with a caption "Its okay buddy, getting old aint easy!!! Max's 11th Birthday!" It also was a side post from all the others on thrillers, just to show that he could be a real person with other interests. 

 I also wrote a post advertising our thriller. This was to show that people from our target audience would like our thriller.