It is very important to find out our target audience, first and foremost. Because it allows us to be able to tailor our short film, to what they may expect from a short film. Creating our short film without this knowledge, may restrict who our short film may apply to, and therefore may not get that much appeal and advertisement. Also because our short film applies to a niche audience, it makes it more important to listen to their ideas and try and incorporate them into our short films. Essentially without an audience there would be no media. Thats why big media companies spend so much time and money, in targetting a particualar audience group. Because from their audience research if they notice they are not recieving a great intrest, they will tweak certain things in order to make it appealable.

It has also become incredibly harder to design for a niche audience, because of the rise in new technological convergence, therefore media can easily be accesed online, without having to go to a cinema or a film festival. Therefore finding ways to make a short film noticed is even more harder, because the power is in the hands of the audience. So this means they are very influential so they could potentially slate our short film, and create a bad 'press' if we don't get it right.

However because you have fragmented audiences, some which only watch online, and others who prefer advertisements in newspapers, it makes it even harder to appeal to the mass, thats why it is essential to find out exactly the audience you are trying to reach, by using questionnaires to eliminate those who might not be into your short film.

Due to our small scale budget, to produce our short film, we are restricted to find easier and cheaper ways to find our target audiences, the most obvious being a questionnaire to a select sample from three main age catergories: Adults, Year 7's and Sixth Formers.

We wanted our questionnaire to generate, more factual quantitative data, therefore we tried to keep to as many closed questions as possible. As we planned to find out more realistic qualitative data from our interviews and focus groups of our target audiences.

When defining our target audience it is importanat we consider:

• Age

• Gender

• Religion

• Race

• Sexuality

• Education

• Occupation

• Disposable Income

• Current&Desired Lifestyle

• Media Interests

• Buying Habits

 

 

http://www.slideshare.net/mattwako/how-media-producers-define-their-target-audience-19065036?related=1