Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When marketing a film before release, it is important to gather audience feedback before and during production so that any mistakes or parts of the final product that aren’t liked too much by the target audience can be changed to make the final product that much more appealing to the target audience. It is important to gather audience feedback during the initial idea phase of a media product, so that you can then find out what people in general think about your product. It is important when coming up with the media package to consider what your target audience is going to be as you can begin to adjust your idea towards the liking's of your target audience. When looking at what target audience you want your media product to have it is important to think about the demographics of that target audience. The demographics for target audiences will include things such as gender, age, religion, class, hobbies and interests. Certain genres of films will target themselves more towards one specific set of demographics, such as animation films being aimed towards children and horror films towards the young adults. 
An example of two film trailers which are aimed at two completely different demographics. The first is for the film Home, which was targeted at kids and the second trailer is for the film Steve Jobs which was aimed at adults.

Trailer for Home

 

Trailer for Steve Jobs

 

When producing an advertisement campaign for a media product, it is important to gather feedback as it can improve your products before the advertisement products are released fully so that they are efficient as possible. Advertisement campaigns will include promotions, advertising and publicity so that the most efficient and effective campaigns for attracting the attention of the target audience can be achieved. Promotion is the partnership with other companies and production to help promote the film with the change of gaining something special form the promotional offer. This generally includes competitions to get tickets to see the film early. Advertising is the use of media products to attract attention to the film. These products will be mainly focused on the target audience, but will often overlay to attract the attention of the secondary audience. The majority of film advertising takes place before the release of the film to build up the hype for the film and can start as early as a year before initial release. Once the product has been released the advertising products will be adapted to attract further attention and some of the products may even be adapted for the DVD advertisement. Publicity is specialist advertising that uses actors and directors directly from the product in things such as TV interviews and editorial coverage and these can often seem more persuasive than pre-paid advertising.

An example of a film that did loads of market research and publicity is The Woman in Black, which was aimed at teenagers and young adults. This was done by use of various advertisement products such as posters and trailers that had been designed to attract the target audience. Publicity was also a key part of the marketing plan for The Woman in Black as Daniel Radcliffe conducted many TV interviews to attract the attention of the target audience which had many similarities to the Harry Potter series which Daniel Radcliffe is most known for.
Below is one of the many interviews that Daniel Radcliffe did as part of the publicity for The Woman in Black

During the pre-production for our trailer, we decided that our target audience would be teenagers and young adults of both genders. Within these demographics, we decided to primarily target our idea towards the mainstream, and then our secondary audience would be those who did not fit within the mainstream audience. With our target audience, we were interested in finding out who watched horror films, if they like them and what they like about them. With this we were able to find out what codes and conventions of the horror genre we should include within our own product. To conduct this research we conducted an online survey on SurveyMonkey to find out in detail what our target audience thought of the horror genre. In addition to this, we went our around the college to hand out physical questionnaires as the people within the college fit well into our primary target audience. 
An example question from our Survey Monkey questionnaire regarding our trailer idea.

 

Once we had an unrefined trailer made, we did class showings so that we could gather feedback on our trailer, which was close to being finished. The people within the class also fit within our target audience, which allowed us to gain reliable feedback on the trailer before we finished it. Feedback for our trailer was collected through the class screening that was conducted and the video in which the feedback was given can be seen in the embedded video above. In addition to this, the trailer draft was published on YouTube publicly which means that anyone can watch it and if they want too can provide feedback in the comments.

Below, are parts of the draft trailer compared to the same part in the final trailer once improvements had been made. In addition, the construction of my magazine and poster can be seen down below in the two Flipsnack documents.

   

Poster and Magazine Feedback

 For my magazine and poster feedback I have asked people from my target audience to critique my work in order to find out what they think is good and bad about my work. For Mr Creek, the target audience is teenagers and young adults who enjoy horror films and who are people are a quite active in going to the cinema to see horror films. For the feedback I asked 5 people from the target audience about my work and they provided the constructive feedback which can be seen below.

When looking at this constructive feedback, I have learned that I need to change some of the smaller conventions on my magazine cover such as the sticker and and sub title and on my poster I need to change the colours which are used on the title as it is to similar to the background image colour and makes reading the title and sub title harder.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have found that the feedback gathered from the questionnaire, draft trailer screening and the magazine and poster critique to have been very useful at finding out what people from my products target audience like about Mr Creek as an idea and trailer and what they then think about the advertising products for the film. An example of a piece of research and feedback that was useful, was the questionnaire question that is showed above and it provided us the information that our target audience especially like being scared during horror films from the jump scares. From this feedback my group decided to add a couple of jump scares into the trailer so that we could efficiently convey to our target audience that our trailer is scary and includes plenty of jump scares which our target audience like.