By Etienne Ben-Okagbue

I conducted a focus group as well as sending out a questionnaire to different sets of people

I also looked at the statistics from the video on you tube as well as looking at the comments

The demographic profile of my audience affected some of the responses, for example in the focus group one of the boys said he didn’t like the girly scenery.

However one girl said she liked how it was simple so she could also focus on the dancers as well as enjoying the scenery

This goes to show that the readings would be based on the type of person giving the feedback

Using focus groups you can a lot of data at once, making the feedback easy to aquire as well as being fast.

It is also cheap

People may be influenced by each other. For instance in my focus group, normally the first person to speak was usually what the other people in the group would say

With the statistics I could identify where my audience was

Also whether they were Boys or girls However it didn’t tell me whether they

liked it or not Was also in small quantities

The feedback let me know that our target audience was correct, in the focus group most of the people that said they liked it were girls

Also people got the concepts I was trying to show in the video, one girl mentioned how she thought the pink balloons were trying to show her girlish side

The video was simple to understand as there wasn’t too much going , a simple combination of a lead singer and dancers

Most people said they would pay for the product as a result of the music video

It didn’t appeal to many of the male secondary audience, the guys in my focus group didn’t like it and neither did my teacher Jason.

The Encoding model(how we produced it) was making it an Indie pop by making it really girly with the pink and purple colours and a few balloons.

The Decoding model (how people read it) was the same as the Decoding model as the audience read it exactly how we wanted them to. Many of them said they got the link between the music video and the digipak.

Blumler and Katz say that auidences are for from passive in their approach to the media; rather they actively choose and consume the media to satisfy particular needs and gratifications which they exhibit. This was true for our piece because from the audience feedback we say that it was mainly people of a feminine nature who liked the video the most. This was because of the Indie Pop setting.

I have learnt that when creating a music campaign for an artist it would make sense to link all the products (e.g. the digipak, the website and the music video) in the campaign together so that people get familiar with the image. This would make it more popular and receivable by the audience

I feel that the audience also too something from this. I also recognise that my audience has engaged with the meanings in my music video in different ways, bringing their own contexts to the reading of the star image – what Hall argues is reception theory. I can understand how my audience can either reinforce or challenge intended meanings in the text.

I have learned from my audience feedback that I have constructed an intended star image and an effective campaign. My target audience has informed what went well, for example, the reception of the narrative element working alongside the performance element was very strong. Many of the audience said they enjoyed the dancers and liked the calm nature of the main artist.

If I was to make any future changes to the campaign I would edit the way we included the stop motion element, the audience pointed out that it would have worked a lot better if we were to include it more.

Also some of the audience said they felt the scenery was a bit plain. To change that I would have used a few more colours in order to keep it interesting

Audience feedback is important market testing in post-production to see if I created the right star image and marketed this purposefully. As Henry Jenkins informs us that we live in a ‘participatory culture’, where fans and audiences are important in circulating meaning and the strength of media messages