What have you learnt from your target audience (TA) feedback?

QUESTION 3 EVALUATION.

Back in November I asked a focus group (Set one Year 11 English aged 15-16, mixed gender) what they would look for in a music video and why they watched music videos. I felt the feed back from this focus group led to a lot of creative decisions in the production of my video as I wanted it to be as appealing possible to them and something they can relate to.

This particular comment from the focus group stood out to me the most. Upon reflection this is what made me realise we needed to make our narrative as clear as possible as people do in fact watch a music video to understand the story the lyrics are trying to tell.

“I Watch music videos to understand the lyrics and

the message they are trying to put across.”

“Take Me To Church by Hozier made me understand the gay community more”

This is another comment that stood out to me. It shows how music videos do actually have an impact on the people who watch them and how the consumers do take notice of what is going on in the video and can learn something from watching a video or widen their understanding about a certain community, culture or social issue.

Our video puts across the message of that it’s okay to be experimenting with relationships in your teenage years and you don’t have to be tied down. I think this particular message makes our video more relatable as in modern day society it is common for people to experiment with multiple partners and relationships. However the message would not be as relatable to an older audience as they are used to having one partner and staying with them for the majority of their lives.

This feedback taught me that to create a successful music video for my target audience it would need to have a clear narrative so the lyrics become more understandable and also the relationship message needs to be very prominent and understandable as it’s an issue that my target audience may come across and they need to know its acceptable not to be totally committed at such a young age.

Use of Social Media.Social media was a key part in collecting feedback. I used both Twitter and Facebook. I used Twitter at the very beginning and then Facebook most recently as on my Facebook I have a wider range of ages and gender.

Focus Groups.I also conducted small focus groups which involved people of my TA age group. I gave them 5 questions to answer and I feel giving them questions to answer made the feedback more specific. If I gave them no guidance then they would have struggled to know what they where looking for.

Although I used quantitative research methods by giving out surveys for the groups to fill in, I also included open questions so I could gain qualitative feedback. However even though I used open questions so I could get more feedback some people still just responded with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers on the survey sheets. This was quite frustrating as it made feedback help limiting because they didn’t expand on what they thought the narrative was just ‘yes’ they understood it. Also the surveys were anonymous so I couldn’t contact the responder and ask them to expand more on their answers.

I think social media was the most successful way of collecting TA feedback as I could reach a wider audience of people who had little media knowledge and a larger age range whereas the focus groups included people who had a lot more media knowledge and where all the same age. Although the focus groups where my TA I felt feedback off an older audience would make it clear if my video would appeal to a wider audience not just 14-21 year olds.

Gender

MalesFemale

This pie chart shows how I got feedback from a mixture of both genders but mostly females. Although it was a love story and romantic narrative the males seemed to enjoy it just as much as the females which made me realise my video would be appealing to an even wider audience.

(7)(11)

TunnelWoodsGraffiti Wall

This pie chart shows what my focus group thought was the best locations used in our video. We knew the tunnel would be the most popular shot as it gave a natural frame.

From the focus I learnt that some shots where out of sync and in other shots the average shot length (ASL) was too long and it was obvious where we was saying ‘action’ and ‘stop’ to the actors as they were waiting around. We acted on this feedback and shortened some shot lengths and added other shots to cut out the waiting around from our actors. I feel this feedback had minimal criticisms but by us acting on it reduced our ASL.

Social Media.My social media feedback on Facebook was mostly from females as I feel like the males on my Facebook did not want to contact me first to ask to watch it whereas the females who gave me feedback where my acquaintances therefore they felt more comfortable contacting me.

Gender

FemaleMale (9)

(1)

I inboxed them the link to my music video and gave them three questions:

Even though they had no media background knowledge I felt they gave me more detailed feedback than the focus groups. This research was more qualitative and because I was actively speaking to the person answering my questions I could ask them to expand if they gave me a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer whereas with the focus groups I could not.

1. What do you like and dislike about the video?2. Does the singer convince you?3. Do you understand the narrative?

Although Conor was the only boy who gave me feedback on Facebook it was very helpful as he did the same Media A level course as me and is doing a Media related degree at University therefore his feedback was detailed and very informative.

All of them said the narrative was very clear and understandable by the way we had her mime his lyrics and the shots we used. This positive feedback was consistent throughout all our TA research so this reassured us that our narrative was clear to basically all of our TA. All the social media feedback commented on how they liked the greyscale/black&white effect

By conducting multiple focus groups with a range of ages (15-16 16-17) I felt I learnt a lot more and got a lot more in depth feedback than I would have done just conducting 1 focus group of people all the same age. I feel the younger focus groups were a lot more honest and gave better feedback whereas the rest held back a bit and were not as critical as they could have been.

This much research was very useful as I got a wide range of responses which led to minor tweaks in my video which concluded in a more successful video and narrative.

Upon reflection I feel I did a sufficient amount of TA research and got the feedback I had hoped for. If I didn’t use social media my feedback wouldn’t have had a wider range of answers as the people on social media gave me more detailed feedback. I have learnt that in some shots although they looked in sync, when uploaded to YouTube it became clear they were a millisecond out. However this did not effect the appeal of the music video to my TA as they enjoyed watching it anyway and liked the way I edited the shots and the locations used.