Evalutaion Question 4&5 - Audience identification and appeal

Evalutaion Question 4&5 - Audience identification and appeal

• 1.
  W H OW O U L D B E T H E A U D I E N C E F O R Y O U R M E D I A P R O D U C T , A N D H O W D I D Y O U A T T R A C T / A D D R E S S Y O U R A U D I E N C E ? Audience Identification and Appeal
• 2.
  My Target Audience I have aimed my media product at girls between the ages of 8-15 years of age who show an interest in pop music, fashion and gossip.  I found my target audience through carrying out audience research for existing pop magazines.  The existing pop magazines included 'Top of the Pops' and 'We love pop' who both had the target audience of young people, most of the readers being females.
• 3.
  Photographs of mytarget audience
• 4.
  I carried outprimary audience research to find out more about my target audience. For example, the question to the answers which can be seen below asked who the person's favourite music artists were, I asked them to list as many as they would like. The results of this question are shown below: This helped in deciding which artists names should appear on my front cover. I decided to include the most popular names on my front cover to entice the audience to buy my magazine. These names included One Direction and Rihanna.
• 5.
  Additional information onTarget Audience  To help my magazine become a success, I decided to research the target audiences of magazines in the same genre including Top Of The Pops and We Love Pop.  As they have the same target audience as my magazine, 8- 15 years old, this information was crucial for the potential success of my magazine.  Information I found included: - Shorter attention spans so enjoy looking at images rather than reading large chunks of copy - They are very fashion conscience and tend to copy famous celebrity styles
• 6.
  Gratifications I Offered Blumler and Katz’s uses and gratification theory suggests that media users play an active role in choosing and using the media. Users take an active part in the communication process and are goal oriented in their media use. The theorist say that a media user seeks out a media source that best fulfills the needs of the user. Uses and gratifications assume that the user has alternate choices to satisfy their need.  With this in mind I needed to encode my media text with codes and conventions of pop magazines for the audience to decode, fulfilling their needs – If I fulfilled their needs then they would buy the magazine again and recommend it. This would help my magazine become a success.  Having gained knowledge of my target audience, I knew what to offer them.  I offered my audience the chance to obtain the latest fashion trends, fulfilling their fashion needs.  Another aspect I offered my audience was access to the latest celeb gossip, focusing on their favourite pop artists which I found from carrying out my primary audience research.
• 7.
  Dyers Utopian Solutions ‘Utopia’ is an imaginary world  Dyers utopian solution theory suggests the idea of escapism  My audience have shorter attention spans and usually read pop magazines as a route of escapism from their school lives.  In order to fulfil this relaxation need, I didn’t include large amounts of text on my magazine and predominantly used images to keep them entertained.  My magazine also allows the readers to escape their own lives and live in the celeb/ pop life through giving them the latest gossip. Hence the reason I called my magazine ‘Pop World’.
• 8.
  Maslow’s Hierarchy ofNeeds  In order for my magazine to be a success I needed to fulfill my audience’s needs so that they keep wanting to buy and read my magazine.  In my magazine I fulfill the social section of the hierarchy through the sense of friendship. I do this through the use of informal language, so it feels to the reader that they are just talking to one of their friends.
• 9.
  Cover lines  Coverlines are short statements found on the front cover of the magazine which describe the articles inside. There overall aim is to encourage the reader to buy the magazine.  My cover lines needed to be bold enough to catch a readers attention. One cover line was about Pop boy band One Direction losing one of their members, Zayn. This was a very relevant and up to date cover line as the band are very popular with my target audience.  One of my Cover lines linked to my main image where my model was holding her finger over her mouth signaling ‘shh’. The cover line was ‘Shannon: you will never get the truth out of me!’. This makes the reader question what this article would be about so will entice the audience to buy the magazine.
• 10.
  Modes of Address I used informal language in my magazine such as not using capital letters in the cover lines. This creates a relaxed atmosphere for the magazine and helps the reader on their escapism route.  This informal, chatty language is also the same s the language they would use when talking amongst their friends. This creates synthetic friendship between my magazine and the audience encouraging them to buy it.  To add to this synthetic peronalisation, I used personal pronouns such as ‘you’ and ‘we’. This takes a directional approach and makes the audience feel like the magazine is talking directly to them.
• 11.
  Implementing Design codes I encoded my magazine with design codes to help attract my audience.  I found that my audience of young girls like bright colours so I created a theme of bright pink, yellow and white. This helped create the house style for my magazine. Pink is also a colour heavily associated with females so including this design code was crucial.  To catch audiences attention when they are walking past all the magazines on the shelf I needed to use bold writing. The bold writing will stand out to the audience and make them take a second look at my magazine. I felt I needed to write my magazine’s name in bold, Pop World, to make it stand out from the rest.