AUDIENCE FEEDBACK
THE IMPORTANCE OF AUDIENCE FEEDBACK • Audience feedback allows content creators to gauge success and popularity before a products release in order to reduce potential losses and estimate profit margins. A film which is an apt example of a good marketing campaign is The Woman in Black. The film used the many faucets of web 2.0 and the media in order to let the film reach as wide of an audience as possible. TWIB’s marketing campaign featured web takeovers, promotions, trailers and physical posters which all enabled the film to reach its intended audience. In order to find the films audience the pedigree of Daniel Radcliffe was used in order to attract those who are in his fan base and also to attract those who are familiar with his performance in the Harry Potter franchise. The films other targeted audience would be fans of the horror genre as the film is an example of the resurgence of horror films. Part of the appeal of the film was that it had mass appeal and utilised the less gory sides of horror in order to attain a 12A rating which boosted its audience size exponentially.
METHODS OF GATHERING FEEDBACK • In order to gather feedback for our products we opted for the methods most easily accessible for us and as a result went for written feedback and spoken in the form of videos recorded just after a screening of our trailer which let the viewers voice their concerns and praise the product. The written feedback took the form of small question sheets which asked for the opinions of our target audience. The aforementioned methods of gathering feedback were used due to how they were easy to obtain and would yield useful results.
DEMOGRAPHIC AND PSYCHOGRAPHICS • Our feedback would be useless if we did not collect it from the right audience and as such we needed to define our target audience so that we could collect useful feedback from them. • Our defined target audience is teenagers to young adults in the age ranges of 16-25 as we believe that they are a group which have been proven to be among the mass group which watch horror films regularly, our film is also meant to be in the supernatural horror subgenre and as such looking at the Woman in Black provided us with most of the information we need apart from how we wanted our film to have some blood, gore etc. in it so we opted to go for the classification bracket above what TWIB got to be safe. • Our psychographic will be those who are of the group who enjoy retro throwbacks from the 80s and 90s due to how our film aims to be a throwback to the B-movie films of the aforementioned decades, the intelligence and social class of our audience is not of major importance due to how our film does not have much assumed knowledge needed or targeted appeal to any single social class due to how we want as large of an audience as possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s1kjS-yDGQ
TRAILER FEEDBACK
• Our trailer feedback took the form of a video of our audience expressing their opinions on the first cut of our trailer. • The primary known concern was the lack of audio and as such it was declared as a known concern so the audience was asked to refrain from commenting on it. The secondary concerns were that there was little context and the audience were left relatively in the dark on the plot and the backstories of the characters, the antagonist featured in the trailer vey little and maybe if they were in it more it would create a more scary/spooky effect. • We were commended on the use of transition from day to night and our use of costume and Bob (the horse) in creating a relatively good looking antagonist.
POSTER AND MAGAZINE COVER FEEDBACK
I collected written feedback from 6 people, evaluating both of my products taking into consideration both the good and bad points of them. The feedback I received on my poster was that the use of colour and the layout fit the theme well and all elements had their place to be without obstructing the primary image. The two tone nature of the poster was commended the most due to how its simplicity is appealing and different from the normal products in the market. The advice I was given in regard to improving the poster was that I could reorganise the text in order to make the date larger and the website smaller, this is understandable as people would want to find out the release date more than the website that advertises it. An odd point was the suggestion of adding a third colour, maybe blue to break up the two tone nature of the trailer, I decided not to act on this suggestion as I think that the two tone colouration added to the appeal of the aesthetic. • (The feedback we collected was of a small sample size and as such may not voice the concerns of the audience at large)
MAGAZINE COVER FEEDBACK • My magazine cover received much more constructive feedback and was more helpful due to how the cover was in a less finished state and needed feedback in order to move forward and become a more complete product as a result. The points which were commended the colour scheme and the use of a smoke effect to make the image suit the theme to a larger degree. • The improvements which were suggested included moving the image to the right more and putting the cover lines on the left side in order to give the image more real estate and give the cover lines a dedicated area where they are not obstructing the main image as much. Smaller suggested improvements included making the main image darker to make it suit the horror genre more, the black boxes around the cover lines were also noted as obstructing the main image and not really being needed as long as the text was bold enough.
AUDIENCE RESEARCH • In order to gather preliminary research we opted for a simple questionnaire made in google forms, the questionnaire was created in order to attain ideas on which to build or change our own idea accordingly in order to effectively target our audience and thus go about the process as if it was a big budget production which relied upon these results to attain a high profit margin. • Our feedback informed us of the gender, film preferences and specific aspects preferred in their viewing experiences, these aspects allowed us to capitalise on the most popular results and change our film to incorporate them, for example changing our scares to match the 50/50 split between liking and not liking jump scares.
HOW FEEDBACK IMPROVED MY WORK • The feedback helped me improve my poster as I found that putting the date above the website was a better fit for the poster as a whole. Smaller changes on the poster included a rewrite of the upper tagline to suit the poster more and relate to the film in some way. • The improvements that were made to my magazine cover were as follows: the main image was moved over to the right more in order to allow the cover lines more space and to enable the image to be more visible. I decided to add one more cover line and reduce the font size in order to appease those who wanted the cover lines to be smaller and also give more information about the perceived content of the magazine.