Evaluation 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Ellie Stephenson,

Amber Liman

and Stephanie

Head

Our target audience

Before we created any promotional products, we had to first decide on our target audience. We concluded that we would focus on young females from the age ranges

most prominently from 15-25. We decided this because we wanted our audience to be able to relate to the action that they see and enjoy the song and its content. Namely,

the lyrics of the song, “girls just want to have fun”, being an example. As the song lyrics themselves automatically appeal to this social group, most interestingly because of the use of the word “girls” as supposed to “women”, inevitably entreaties young females. As our product grew however, we noticed that the song also appealed to older women,

as they remembered when the original song was popular in the early 80s. We then made a plan of making the song title and artist on prominent display throughout other

products we produced. This was, we believed that elder women would recognise the title, and, ultimately, want to watch our video.

We used a number of promotional strategies to entice our audience. We first created social networking accounts on Twitter, Vine and Instagram, which are the three main

social networking sites of this day. We decided against creating a Facebook account as it is rapidly decreasing in popularity , whilst the other three are growing. In order to achieve the best results from making these accounts, we regularly posted images,

videos and “tweets” to our followers, alerting them to the latest news and the progress of our music video.

This is a screen shot of our Instagram account. It consists of 50 followers, which enables us to post images that they will enjoy and, as a result, they would possibly tell their friends and our

account would grow even more. We have regularly posted photos and videos on this account as it is the one with the

biggest following.

Focus Groups We conducted two focus groups before filming our music video. The first was taken from two students of the age range we were trying to appeal to, yet they were of both genders. Although we wanted to directly appeal to the female market, we wanted to have an insight from a young males perspective so we knew what he would expect, and what we could have added. The questions that we asked for the two focus groups were the same and as follows:1) What do you expect in a music video? We asked this first as we thought it was the most broad of them all. The answer is due to personal preference however, we were surprised to see that most answers were relatively similar. 2) What do you expect in a pop video? We asked this question as it relates to our own specific genre of song the difference we found was that they wanted to see “fun” mostly in a pop video as supposed to other genres. 3) Do you think that watching a music video would make you want to purchase the song?We found that this question depended on the strengths of the video. We asked this as our song is obviously released and, therefore, we wanted our video to match the hype of the song. 4) What is your favourite music video and why? We asked this as we initially explored adding intertextuality in the video, and we wanted to know the most popular videos. 5) Do you think it is important to have both genders in the music video and why? We found that this answer also depended on the preference of the person, however having both genders would appeal to a wider audience.

After the first focus group, we decided to change the initial idea of

having only females in the music video. Instead, we decided to add

both genders into our final product, e.g. in the “club” scenes. This

enabled us to appeal to a wider target audience as supposed to one.

The second focus group made us think about the choreography in the final product. Although the

dancing is subtle, we decided to add it right at the start to

introduce the song and compile with the expected codes and

conventions and expectations of our final focus group.

Questionnaires We produced five questionnaires which we distributed to three females and two males of three age ranges. Unsurprisingly, we received dissimilar results for our questions. Typically, the elder people that we asked informed us that they preferred music of the decade that they grew up in, and they listened to far less music than our younger participants on a daily basis. We found that almost everyone had a different preference in terms of decade of music, which we asked as our song was obviously from the 80s. Although they did have a preference in terms of decade, they typically did not care for the origin of the song, and just the song itself. Interestingly, we found that our participants watched music videos mostly from their smart phone or laptop, and the source of the video was YouTube. Our members rarely watched music videos from their TV which was significant for us. Due to the rapid rise of YouTube viewers, we decided to post our finished product on the site, as we knew it would be more likely viewed than if we posted it any other way. The most important finding however, was that each of our participants agreed that both genders should be present in a music video. This is something we took into careful consideration and, as a decision from reviewing the results, we decided to add both genders to appeal to each social group.

Looking back at our questionnaire, we could have made some changes in order to give us the best feedback we could receive. We could of first established the persons gender, so we could know exactly if the

results were taken from our target audience or others.

Although we were interested as to when the participants favourite decade was, the

results did not obviously assist us in making our video, as we had already chosen the

song. It was useful however, to find out how

people watch music videos, which we found to be online on the site “YouTube”, which is

where we decided to post our finished video.

Another advantage and strength from the questionnaire was the end question, where we not only established that we needed both genders present, we also found out

why our members believed there should be both genders involved. We discovered that they believed it was important because we

would be able to appeal to a wider audience and fit into the professional videos today.

Our original unanswered questionnaire -

Audience Response – Rough Cut After completing the first cut of our music video, we decided to post it online in order to receive some constructive feedback that would help

us improve our final product and make the necessary changes.

We asked for feedback from our teachers. They told us that they liked many aspects of the video, yet there were some improvements that could be made. Some of the shots should be cut down in order to accompany the pace of the song. Furthermore, some of the lip sync of the video was inaccurate, we therefore decided to go back to the video and edit it more thoroughly in order to achieve the best grade possible. However, they both did tell us that we had made a strong start and, for a rough cut, the video was of high standard.

Link -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0ytWldKkyo&list=UUDmNwPo_ZhTXHU4Hc5JuMgw&feature=c4-overview

Promoting our final productWhen we had finished our final video, we wanted to advertise it in

order to receive feedback of others opinions. We first published the video on YouTube which we thought would be the best way for people to view our video. We then posted the link on every social network site we had created, even posting a “teaser” on our Vine and Instagram accounts. Furthermore, we individually posted the

link to the video on our personal twitter accounts, which was a way to promote the video to our friends, who would then pass the

information on.

Evaluation We have learnt a great deal from our audience feedback as, unlike our AS coursework, we have carefully considered each method and made sure that each results benefit us in making our final product. We have continually decided to refer back to our initial audience feedback and we have carried out many other audience feedback tasks throughout the process. We believe that it has been extremely beneficial for us to conduct multiple methods that would benefit us. The most beneficial being from posting an initial “rough cut” of our video. This enabled audiences to give us constructive feedback that we could quickly work upon, before producing our final video. We have made sure to keep referring back to answers from those in our target audience form our focus group and questionnaires and, by the response of the final product, we believe we have been successful.