TARGET AUDIENCE RESEARCH

TARGET AUDIENCE RESEARCH – WHY?

‘No film is for everyone. Each film has a target audience. It’s your job to know – specifically – who they are. Your film can’t communicate effectively or

succeed at the box office unless you know the group of people for whom you are making it’

Taken from Canadian Filmmaker Website (2012)

How many of you have seen:

• Marigold Hotel?

• Salmon Fishing in the Yemen?

• Paranormal Activity?

• Twilight?

TARGET AUDIENCE – WHO?How can we categorise different audience groups?

TARGET AUDIENCE – WHO?A target audience is defined primarily by gender and age range.

Additional elements may include:• socioeconomic status• rural or urban• Race• family status• theatre goers or not• special interests. These interests can include anything from

political leanings to religion or the particular subject matter of the film, such as football (Mike Bassett: England Manager), visual art (Pollock) and human rights (Hotel Rwanda).

TARGET AUDIENCE RESEARCH – HOW?You will be doing both primary and secondary research.

Primary – questioning members of your target audience and using their responses to inform your planning (qualitative data).

Secondary – using audience profile data from Pearl and Dean (or similar) to inform your planning (mostly quantitative data).

PRIMARY RESEARCHAfter you do your group pitch presentation (next week) you will ask the class some questions to get some feedback on your film idea.

You will record their responses (and evidence this on your journal) and use this to help you develop your film ideas.

You might also do vox pops to get feedback directly from potential audience members.

SECONDARY RESEARCH1. Decide on 3 existing films that are similar to the type of thriller film

you are creating an opening for.

2. Use Pearl and Dean’s business website to get the target audience profile data for these films.

SECONDARY RESEARCH3. Take screen shots from Pearl and Dean (cmd + shift + 4)

4. Upload the screen shot images to your ‘files’ area in Mahara

5. Open the screen shot image file from the files area to get the URL address that you can then use to insert the images into a journal entry.

6. Title the journal entry ‘Target Audience Research’.

7. Summarise the key audience information for each film.

8. Conclude your entry with how the data helps you decide on the best target audience for your own film (this is not necessarily exactly the same as for the existing films - you may be doing more of a teen version than the films you researched so your target audience decision would reflect this).

Example of stages 3&4: http://www.slideshare.net/lizmedia/target-audience-research-example

HIGHER LEVEL JOURNAL’S WILL ALSO INCLUDE THIS:Consider and list some ways in which you could try to appeal to your target audience.

Some interesting thoughts on marketable elements here: http://www.lavideofilmmaker.com/business/the-film-marketability-reality-check.html

USEFUL WEBSITES

http://business.pearlanddean.com/

http://uk.imdb.com/

Wikipedia

Can you find other useful sources of target audience information?