Who would be the audience for your media product?

EvaluationBy Brigit Gunton

Different Audiences and their styles…

Rock- Red, black and white are the common colours. They also use a distressed font. They use a loud, sharp and striking image and style to gain the audiences attention and to represent the genre.

Pop – The style scheme is very girly, from the colour scheme mainly being pink and the love heart in the masthead. Also they use a picture of a boy band to attract the typical young female reader.

Acoustic – the colours are quite neutral and the photo suggests it is a little high brow. Showing the audience it is directed at more of a middle class adult audience. The font used is very simple and easy to read.

Dance – The colour scheme is usually black, white and pink (or another bright colour) to convey a club like feel. It also gives off quite a ‘cool’ effect, for example the image and the sparseness of text they have comparing to the pop and rock magazine.

My audience…The age• In the beginning I found from my survey, interviews and media packs that the target

age for my magazine was mostly between 16-19. (see image below from my survey)

• I have kept to this target audience and tried to make my magazine age specific. I have done this through using things such as the character on the front of my magazine is 17, wearing a hoody, and smoking, therefore this tends to not attract the older audience because they assume from the cover that it is a young persons thing. The colour scheme on the front cover also adds to this, by portraying a party like feel with the bright colours and contrasts, older people are less likely to buy.

• Also I have made some of the cover lines age specific such as the ‘global gathering release killer headliner’, although people under 18 can read this article, the festival is 18+.

My audience…Gender• From the beginning my genre was always male dominated, for example in my

audience research I found in the Mixmag media pack that there was….% boys and ….% girls, I also found the majority was boys in my survey on surveymonkey. (picture below shows the boy to girl percentage from my survey)

• I have tried to target the boys by using a male character on the front, a DJ that they aspire to. Although the male character can also be used for girls to admire, therefore still addressing and targeting the smaller percentage of girls.

I have also tried to keep it more open to both genres by making the articles non gender specific, e.g. ‘Global Gathering release killer headliner’, this is a festival that attracts both male and females. I have tried to veer away from the magazine becoming a ‘lads mag’ although as the majority of the readers are male, certain things like the pictures all being of men make the magazine more directed at boys.

ComparisonPlanning to evaluation

• I think I have stuck to my plan fairly well, because before I started the creation of my magazine I did extensive research into who my target audience was.

• This research has helped me massively from the big things (such as what sort of character to have on the front-gender, clothing, age) to the small details (Such as what sort of words to use – reading age).

• From the beginning I planned I would target majority of boys but still leave it open for girls to read and not be too gender specific, which I think I have kept to. I also planned to aim it at mainly 16-19 which I have done through the subject matter, language and many other ways.

• I also found out more specific details about my audience in my planning such as the audience for ‘electronic dance music’ are always the first to be at the up coming festivals, have the latest gadgets and the newest tunes. I have addressed this by having a competition for the latest Bose headphones and advertising a smaller up and coming dance festival.

Overall Reader Profile...• Age: 16-19

• Gender: 75% male, 25% female

• Class: Majority middle class.

• They spend a lot of time going out partying and spending most of their money on clubbing, drinking, latest gadgets and tunes.

• http://brigitgunton.blogspot.com/#!/2012/02/target-audience-research-media-pack.html

• Above is one of my previously created slide shows on the target audience that I created before the creation of the magazine.