Audience Research

Audience research is a major part of any media company's work. They use questionnaires, focus groups and comparisons to existing media texts, and spend a great deal of time and money finding out if there is anyone out there who might be interested in their idea.

It's a serious business; media producers basically want to know the;

• income bracket/status
• age
• gender
• race
• location

of their potential audience, a method of categorising known as demographics. Once they know this they can begin to shape their text to appeal to a group with known reading/viewing/listening habits.


One common way of describing audiences is to use a letter code to show their income bracket:

A Top management, bankers, lawyers, doctors and other highly salaried professionals

B

Middle management, teachers, many 'creatives' e.g. graphic designers

C1

Office supervisors, junior managers, nurses, specialist clerical staff

C2

Skilled workers, tradespersons (white collar)

D

Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers (blue collar)

E

Unemployed, students, pensioners, casual workers  They also consider very carefully how that audience might react to, or engage with, their text. The following are all factors in analysing or predicting this reaction. Audience Engagement- This describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text. Audience Expectations- These are the advance ideas an audience may have about a text. This particularly applies to genre pieces. Don't forget that producers often play with or deliberately shatter audience expectations. Audience Foreknowledge-This is the definite information (rather than the vague expectations) which an audience brings to a media product. Audience Identification- This is the way in which audiences feel themselves connected to a particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle. Audience Placement- This is the range of strategies media producers use to directly target a particular audience and make them feel that the media text is specially 'for them'. Audience Research- Measuring an audience is very important to all media institutions. Research is done at all stages of production of a media text, and, once produced, audience will be continually monitored.

I have found this information from mediaknowall.

In my lesson I have been discussing what market researchers do to determine audiences likes and interests I have used BFI to get some statistics on audiences. This has confirmed for me that my target age range of 15-24 as the horror film 'World War Z' is 5th ranked for the % of the films target audience of that age.

I have made a questionnaire and asked people whose favourite genre is Horror to complete one from a variety of ages ranging between 15-50 year olds, I have then collected the data and represented each question in a form of either a pie chart using Microsoft Excel or a wordle on WordItOut.

Here is my questionnaire I gave to the people who I asked.

My first question asked what is their favourite horror film?

My second question asked why horror films are their favourite genre?

My third question is what persuades you to see a film?

My fourth question is can you list some examples of films from this genre?

The fifth question is what endings would you like to see in Horror films?

 My sixth question is what ideas do you think could be effective for the ending of my film?

My seventh question is what do you think the possible titles could be?

My eighth question is what do you think about the main character being possesed?
Everyone that I asked said it would be effective because possession is a popular theme for horror films so a large audience would be interested in the film.

In summary I think that it is clear that horror film based on possesion are the most popular type from my research as they said The Conjuring and Devil Inside where favourites. I think it will be important to end my trailer with a cliffhanger, this will then add more adrenaline for the watcher and this is two things that were clearly highlighted as being popular in the research I took out.