Evaluation Activity 2‐ How does your media product represent particular social groups?
I mainly wanted to aim my magazine and teenagers between 15‐17 I chose this because I thought it would be the easiest range of people to link to because I would be able to relate with them, as I would fit into this age bracket. My magazine contains representations of teenage girls. I also had to think of a suitable target audience that I would be able to get feedback from, for example there was no point in me having a target audience of 20‐30 year olds because research would have been harder to gather targeting older people this is why I decided to go for 15‐17 year olds. I decided to target girls and boys because I thought that it gave it a better range and that instead of just targeting girls it could target boys as well, I thought this would be beneficial for marketing reasons as well because if you have a magazine that appeals to just girls only girls will buy it whereas if you aim it for both than both will be attracted to the magazine and evidently your magazine will make more money. As my genre of music was aimed at rock/Indie people I decided that I would take images to go with this. I noticed that a lot of rappers or Indie bands have serious expressions with dark hair that pales out there face but they will have clothes that stand out. There fashion is a big importance to them so for this I decided that I would get my 2 models Kelly and Lilly to be serious in most of the images. I also made sure that they had original fashion, which was quite casual but quite different as well, I didn’t want it to be too different because I had to think I was trying to attract a male audience as well as female audience. I think if I was to undertake this task again I would make sure that I used a male model in at least one out of the three finishing products, or added him into the band because I feel this could have attracted more males. I feel that my work is mainly female dominated because there are two girls featuring on the front cover, double page spread and contents so there isn’t any reference to males. I also found out in my research that males are a lot more inclined to buy a music magazine that has a man on it because they feel as if they can relate to the magazine whereas some males said that they would prefer buying a magazine with girls on because that is what 9/10 boys are interested in. I decided to go for purple because it was my forth most popular colour on my questionnaire and I thought that this colour wasn’t to female orientated as it was with black as well which gave it dominance. I also made sure my font throughout appealed to both a male and female audience. When I researched my target audience I realised that roughly 35% of my Facebook friends ages 15‐17 wanted to go on holiday somewhere hot to relax and party so I thought that I would include this in my contents page to show that I have included some of my target audiences interests. I decided I would include some summer holiday offers because I knew that this would appeal to 35% of my target audience. I didn’t want to constantly go with the majority because I wanted to challenge stereotypes and make sure that I was getting all the different options instead of just going with the most popular answer.
On the left is NME magazine featuring Florence and the machines. As we can by this image her hair is quite a dominant feature of the magazine, she also has no expression. Both eyes are concentrating on the reader and it is almost like they follow you wherever you go, this makes her eyes also a dominant feature. She is wearing a plain t‐shirt this is done purposely because if she was to have a patterned top this makes draw away the attention from her. On the left is a picture of Kelly she is holding her hair and is wearing a patterned jumper. Her hair is brown and messy this stands out against her yellow background. Her brown eyes are very dark and concentrating on the reader this is very similar to Florence and the machines eyes. Whereas Florence has a plain top Kelly has a patterned top, they’re both wearing necklaces maybe to signify wealth. I am connoting a sort of series, quite aversive look for my representation of teenage femininity.