Question 3 What have you learned from your target audience feedback?
What I learnt about my target audience feed back is largely shaped by how my team member and I went about collecting data. We used Google docs to formulate a questionnaire as it was extremely accessible and optimised for that purpose.It also allowed for people to answer anonymously which was important in order for people to give their honest opinions, this was especially useful as we sent the questionnaire to people we personally knew who had the potential to be bias if their identity was not protected .This medium also allowed us to collect a range of quantitative and qualitative information that enabled us to see a correlation in the data. After creating the questionnaire we were able to export it and send it to people who we thought represented our target audience most accurately.
Examples of quantitative data we collected were things such age and gender, we felt it was important to establish these details at the beginning of the questionnaire as it could of had significant impact on the rest of the questionnaire. This is something we recognised from the research and planning part of this project, often media products and texts are targeted or aimed towards a specific gender within a demographic.
This is an indication that we managed to reach our demographic in terms of the range in ages, however what was useful to know is to what extent we were able to engage our audience while.
80% of our participants said they were very engaged with our music video, this we felt could be attributed to the fact that we were careful to create accurate representations of our target demographic. This also meant that we were successful in the way we chose to convey narrative in our music video, the simple three part structure proved to be digestible as well as compatibility to embed engaging ideas within the structure.
What we learnt from the collection of qualitative data?
The inclusion of of qualitative questioning in our questionnaire was important so that we could gauge the level of the audience engagement. We felt that if members of the audience were invested enough to form their own opinions based on experiencing the music video, it would tell us how effective our music video was in achieving audience interpellation. One thing in particular that stood out was what people felt to be the most significant part of the video, what was interesting is that all of these responses are events in the narrative that we put an extensive amount of thought into. All of the scenes mentioned above in the questionnaire have the inclusion of some element of symbolic code, enigmatic code and editing techniques that seek to convey a certain notion. Overall what was highlighted is the importance in carefully planning the scenes in any media text and having a clear idea of what it is you hope to achieve in the inclusion of certain techniques and methods.
We learnt that we were able to represent our target audience accurately enough that 100% of participants felt the story line and the theme of the video to be relatable. From our research and planning it came to our attention that the themes presented in our music videos such as loss of love are prominent in texts surrounding young adults. This is a clear example of the importance of market research and audience segmentation,
Certain questions allowed us to see how effective the application of media theories was, for example ‘What do you feel is the central meaning of the video ?’. This particular question showed how a text can be multidimensional and that depending on the person and their context interpretation may differ. The split between the 20% who felt the central meaning was love is hard and the other 20% who felt it was young people are fragile, is an example of ‘fans being textual poachers’ something said by Henry Jenkins. Participants have taken meanings that are most useful or speak to them the most and used it to shape their view of the text.
This question although straightforward was very useful in determining my level of competency in using creative/editing media technologies. Consistent professionalism was something we wanted to achieve as we were aware that it would play a factor in how audience members viewed our product and how seriously they took it.
Finally there has been a focus on how audience feedback allowed me to gain a better understanding of what I was able to achieve, however it also highlighted what I was not able to achieve. Media Theorist Stuart Hall said that ‘producers encode meanings’ whereas audience member decode them, however what was brought to my attention is the potential for their to be a discounted between the producer and the audience. 80% of our participants chose the answer ‘it works but it is hard to understand’. Initially my thoughts were that I had failed to produce something that worked as effective symbolism, however upon reflection it may be that I asked the wrong question. I feel now it may have been more suitable to ask ‘what potential symbolic links can you make between the digipak and the music video ?’ and structured it so that participants could write out their own answers. In hindsight this particular part of the questionnaire was too subjective and does not work well as useful quantifiable data. In conclusion it would been more useful if we were able to access a larger sample of our target audience with a wider range of more sophisticated questions enabling us to further our development.