Evaluation - Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

As mentioned before the film will be targeting a range of youth aged between 16 and 24 primarily, which is a large  number of people as these are the ages that go to the cinema more often than any other. These teenagers and young adults go out to cinemas in large groups as a social activity, and groups starting from just a couple to anywhere from 10 to even 40 people means a lot of ticket sales for the cinemas.

Target Audience Profile

• Name: Julia Ruff
• Age: 18
• Currently studying at a sixth form college having chosen English, Geography and Psychology as her A-Level subjects.

LIKES:

• Going out on a Friday/Saturday night with her friends
• Watching TV dramas such as 90210, Skins, Waterloo Road, CSI
• Loves technology. Owns a Blackberry where she is constantly on Facebook  + Imdb checking out the latest films and their given reviews.  
• Has an unlimited cinema pass to Cineworld cinemas, and spends her Sunday nights watching a new film every week with her best mate, Sarah, whether it’s a blockbuster hit, or a low-budget production.

DISLIKES:

• Downloading/streaming films on her computer – prefers the whole cinema-experience.
• Being home alone at night
• Staying indoors on the weekend
• Taking public transport.

The horror/thriller genre will target a lot of boys and girls as it doesn’t appeal to just a single gender like a action/spy film might attract boys and a soppy romantic love story may attract girls; this genre appeals to both girls and boys thrills them with different parts of the film, either the suspense or the sheer terror or seeing what may happen next or as simple as the gore and death in a film, it applies to all. The different themes outlined in question 1 all come into play here.

• The advertising of the marketing campaign links to question 3, with the distributor predominantly using the internet as a gateway to a vast audience to market the film to. Social networking sites to advertise, make events on Facebook such as premieres, groups for films, create a virtual entourage online. Students joining groups, friends seeing them join; word of mouth at school and university where they spend a lot of their time. Internet provides a large selection of people that the film is reached out to, and so people outside the target market could also be interested; a cheap but highly effective way of advertising which is good especially for low budget films. 

• Youtube would be a free form of advertising by uploading trailers up onto it for everyone on the internet to see, a huge audience range to appeal to which could lead to an unexpected factor of the audience with increased interest in the film.

• Channels like e4 that teenagers watch when not on Facebook, shows a lot of programs for youth, perfect for showing advertisements on mostly around 8-11 o’clock when most youth sit down to watch TV. It will be advertised similar to Paranormal Activity (Peli, 2009), with the online campaign spreading like wildfire and word of mouth increasing this anticipation even more.