Target Audience - Brendon

Overview of Theory

There are many different factors that have to be considered when identifying the target audience for your product. In this case the product is a movie, and the main factors the company will have to take into account when choosing their target audience lies within what is included in their movie. Violence, emotional drama and tension are the main themes within our movie and therefore we would base our target audience on those who these factors appeal to. The traditional and almost outdated way of choosing or identifying a target audience would be to use the demographic approach which sets out age groups for the target audience, relying on the fact that people in that age group will all like the content within the movie. Our demographic would be 15 to 35 year olds which coincides with the key demographic of 18-34 year olds. The demographic system also takes in to account gender alongside the age group selection, with this knowledge of the demographic system our movie actually is non-gender specific and would appeal to all genders within our demographic age group.

The theorist Ang stated that this way of choosing a target audience is outdated and not relevant in current times as audiences consist of individuals with individual tastes rather than an overall taste for an age group. The new system he proposed was the VALs system (values, attitude and lifestyles). This system narrows down audiences into certain age groups and genders as well as peoples personal tastes which make the system more reliable to production companies and those deciding who the movie will appeal to. With this system in mind our key factors such as the violence, emotional drama and the tension we used the VAL system to more accurately decide on our target audience.

Another theorist named Fiske actually contradicted both of the previous systems and stated a particularly radical theory that there are in fact no audiences that exist. The reason he says this is that everyone in the world is an individual and therefore will have completely different tastes and individual likes as there is so much choice that will cater to their taste. We could not follow this theorist’s way of thinking as we needed to choose a target audience for our movie and therefore chose a system that would be more reliable and include more variables and data, the VALs system.

Two theorists named Blumer and Katz classified the audience by saying that they seek movies for two things, the first of these is just people who “use” the movie just for entertainment or to escape life and their problems. The second thing audience will look for is “gratification”, these audiences will use movies for self worth if others are having worse problems than them in the movie or for social bonding with others after the movie. We hope our film will provide some of these uses and gratifications and the trailer will hint to the audience that this will be the case. For example the fast pace and action shots should promise entertainment, while the mystery element should give people lots to talk about and therefore promote social bonding.

Another theorist called Silverstone stated that audiences are consumers. They like to be able to watch the movie and make believe that what we have seen is actually real as the movie seemed like it was a more interesting place. The second thing they want is performance from the movie, this falls into fan fiction where fans actually take themes from the movie and write or rein act there favourite scenes and add their own twists to something they prefer. A key example of this is when people make YouTube parodies of movies they have seen that are almost tributes to the real movies for others to see. We are allowing for the audience to interact with our film in an active way through our promotional campaign as we provide a strong tease element with the character posters and also through use of social networking sites where audiences can post views, interact with character profiles etc and ‘play’ by pretending these characters are real.

Our Approach

http://www.movieweb.com/movies/2012/war

This site suggests that war films are considered a good bet as there are a substantial number released each year. Therefore we can be confident that there is a target audience for our film.

http://voices.yahoo.com/the-thought-provoking-appeal-homeland-10781637.html

Our film is not only a film about war, but instead focuses on family relationships, the consequences of war and also questions whether high level military decisions are moral or not. The TV show Homeland has been a big success and deals with similar issues and has an ambiguous appeal like (hopefully) our film. Its success shows that there is a market for challenging drama where war is a part of it but is the agent of the conflict rather than driving the narrative. So I feel we can tap into an existing market who will be looking for more of this kind of drama.