Evaluation Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Discussing our audience



 The primary audience of our media product is 15-25 year olds, who could be considered to fit into the thrill-seeker demographic, as they seem the most likely to enjoy the horror present within it, and are the biggest consumers of the modern horror genre. This can be attributed to a number of reasons.  Modern horror films such as ours often use youthful teenagers in there cast, with attributes often associated to them, potentially making them more relatable for an audience of a similar age group.  In terms of secondary audiences, older consumers, in there 30’s and 40’s will also be catered to, due the aspects of psychological thriller within our movie, similar to the likes of say silence of the lambs and into the night.

 The UK box office of this week (January 10^th-January 17^th 2015), the “Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death” currently stands at number 7 on the charts with a mass grossing of 3.97 million pounds. This gargantuan number shows that horror films as a market are extremely viable, with a vast and varied audience to consume horror based products. This clarifies to me that the film that we hypothetically are producing could succeed in todays media stirring pot.

 The film and media industry often use teenagers and young adults in the marketing of their movies and television shows. An few examples of this may be posters of films such as final destination which include crowds of frightened looking young adults, and television shows such as "The Walking Dead" who's posters and advertisements often focus on younger characters such as "Carl Grimes", and "Sophia Pelletier".  This could cause audiences to be more fearful, as they will instinctively fear more for the wellbeing of youth. Also, younger consumers who witness these adverts may be more compelled to invest within the respective movie and television show due to characters being advertised as the same age group, allowing them to have deeper emotional connections with them.

 We were given consumer feedback when we advertised early drafts of our film to our classmates along with pitching our initial ideas as to what we wanted the film to be. Our classmates along with our teacher recommended to us the alteration of a few things. For example, we originally intended to show the killing of our victim, but we were advised not to due to the fact that it would  be very hard to pull off and would offer far less mystery. We took there advise and chose not to show the murder scene, and instead to heavily insinuate it.

  The profiler mechanic on YouGov served as an excellent means to gather information in regards to the consumers of films similar to our own. We chose the film psycho due to its similarities with our own film and we found that the age range-of the films audience was primarily 40-59 year old men. This contradicts our audience research which revealed teenagers and young adults to be the most likely consumers of our product, but it is very likely that the age jump is simply a result of psycho being quite an old movie (1960), and so at the time, those we belonged to the films demographic were a similar age to our own. We found that the film was primarily successful in the west coast, which allows us to have a good idea to primarily distribute marketing for our film. We found that the demographic also shared an interest in social networking sites, primarily Facebook. This allows us to get a good understanding of where we can cyber-advertise our movie.