Target Audience results - Miss Miller

Our research was carried out for a number or reasons. Firstly we need to understand the general opinions of the population for a set sample size of 40. We needed to narrow down our target audience and get accurate feedback on what we should include in our music video when we come to planning and creating the content of it. Secondly it is vitally important that we create a video that our target audience will defiantly like so we need to conform strictly to the feedback given and not guess what an expect audience wants. The questions asked were designed specifically to get the feedback that we desired from the questionnaire population. We didn't receive any surprise results and gained the typical feedback we expected.

Question one tells us that the population of 40 that we  asked that the basis of them was around 15-19 years old. This will be around the age range that we will base our music video on.

Question two tells us that the majority of our population listen most frequenty to the pop genre, with Hip-Hop second and third Rock. Our music video is a branch of rock (Psychedelic) so from this at least we know now that we will have quite a sizable audience size.

Question three is the first time that we see actual data that can assist us when we come to the advanced planning stages of our music video. We can see clearly from the data that our target audience want a video that is mostly narrative with also strong elements of performance also. A small percentage do prefer concept which suggests that our audience want a video that can be clearly understood with no mixed messages or anything involved which leads them to make their own opinions.

Question four suggests that the majority of people asked have never heard of the branch of rock our music video will be based on. In turn this shrinks our audience size. This could be a positive also in some ways as we could be more creative with our video being more diverse to attract attention from outside of the genres audiences, but at the same time we do need to follow the typical conventions to keeps the genres audience entertained.

Question five shows us that sample of people we asked enjoy there music videos particularly when there is a common use of the sexulisation of the female body. This is a typical convention of our genre so it is something that we need to consider when planning. We need to see if this will fit in with our song, lyric wise and if we feel this particular footage should be shown to our target audience as it may not be suitable for the age range that we want to focus on.

Question six has similar ideas to that of three as we see for the audience that an unconventional video is not appealing and therefore we must have a strict and conventional narrative, iconography etc. Just behind that is the use of Excessive Swearing which already solves itself as our lyrics do not contain any swear words nor offensive connotations. Finally we should have a clear storyline to not confuse audiences and leave them to conform their own opinions on what messages are trying to be conveyed.

Question seven shows us that our sample prefer to see the artist of the song in their watched music video. This could be numerous reasons but mainly due to the fact that this is what they expect to see. When planning we need to take into account if we are going to use an artist or just be purely narrative based. But due to the results we will probably show the band performing.

Question eights results suggest that from the majority of people that we questioned that they were not particularly fans of Tame Impala's work, despite this over 25% of people did like it so it can be deemed that we will have quite a substantial audience considering the fact that our chosen genre has a rather small size/fan base. Our video therefore needs to be made for the people who would listen to this band and the video needs to conform to the bands conventions so that the audience will most probably enjoy the content that we produce.  

Question nine falls to a similar view to  that of eight as once again the overall assumption is the fact that an increased. Again one positive out of these results is the fact that we may not have to be retained by the conventions of our chosen artist and can therefore have our music video be more open genre wise to appeal to a bigger target audience, maybe even cross genre charactisic's in some ways. But indeed we still want to focus on pleasing the target audience as these are the people our video will be mostly aimed at. 

Question ten and our last question on the survey we asked if the sample like the use of CGI and special effects in a music video. The overall answer gained was as intisipated as we saw a deadlock between people preferring and other that it did not appeal to. This suggests that we as a group need to decide whether we use, don't over use or don't use at all any CGI or special effects in our video as we want to please as many members of the target audience as possible.

In order to gain further research into our target audience we decide to gain additional infomation with the use of Vox Pops, the following 5 are the ones that I have filmed. We decided to ask different questions from that of our questionaire as we realised that the majority of the people asked haven't heard of Pyschedelic Rock let alone Tame Impala. We therefore had to plan this stage out differentlty. We designed another questionaire with 5 different questions that were based around the music video we would be re-producing. We first showed our samples the video and then got them to anwser the following questions.

1) Do you like Tame Impala

2) Did you enjoy the music video, why?

3) What elements did you enjoy about the video?

4) What elements didn't you enjoy about the video?

5) What improvements would would you implement?

These are the findings we found:,



What subculture will our video follow?

A sub-culture is a group of people who are united through common value system and tastes (i.e Clothes, Music, Popular etc.) They can also be a group who are positioned outside of the mainstream, as they go against the mainstream of what is popular.

Our video will follow Grant McCracken theory. He says that if we look at the array of values, and ideologies then we can't say all sub-cultures came from one culture. It therefore assures that all sub-cultures come from one culture as a reaction to mainstream. Therefore to compensate for this we are going to create a video that will appeal to all as we are trying to merge the conventions of more Mainstream genres and Psychedelic rock into one to attract attention from both sets of audiences.

On the other hand other theorists have a completely differing view as the CCCS (Centre for Comtempory Cultures Study), they rather see that all subcultures come from one cultures and are branch outs of the mainstream. This theory is deemed out of date due to the fact that it doesn't relate to the 21st Century, the theory rather generalises when it should be particular.

Pop Music and Youth Culture - there are two rival views between the two

1) Pop Stars are constructed to appeal to a specific market with specific values.

2) The audience are so unpredictable in their likes and dislikes, so record companies can never truly know how to target them.

In fact both of these theories are true as this is how music celebrities and their record labels opperate. They  try to make the artist appeal as high as possible to the target audience/ general audiences but the audiences tastes and preferences change so fast that targetting is harder for labels and disiding what steps to take is very difficult.

To conclude, our research was very helpful as we gained an idea of what our target audience wants to see in the video. Thinks that we found from our sample are that they would prefer a narrative/performance based music video, that features "maybe" due to the genre and its conventions. Also they want a clear storyline that doesn't confuse them with the artist featuring with the video itself. To over come this we will sit down as a group and brainstorm narrative ideas. We will then decide on one that we feel is more suited for the use in the context of our music video. After this we will address each segment of the narrative as a group, until all is complete and we have a narrative that we feel can easily be understood by the audience through camera angles, MES etc. (This will be completed when we create our storyboards.

One signficant point that needs to be noted is that the people we asked mainly didn't know who Tame Impala are, this is why we adapted our questions when filiming the vox pops otherwise we wouldn't have gained much information as we had due to people not know who the band are and what their music videos look like.

What they like - Effects, Zooming in and out, Colours are interesting, Somethings always happening.

From this we will take these items on board, the audience would like a wide array of effects to be used to keep the video that they are watching more entertaining these effects will be some used with a balance of colour to keep the audience more visually engaged. The idea of zooming in and out we will take on board but this is completely dependant on the camera angles and narrative that we use. Finally we will always try to make sure something is happening in the video so that we keep to audience interested throughout the video.

What they dont - Randomnise, Repetitivness,

In our video as already mentioned we will make sure that we will try to keep the narrative as engaging as possible my having a meaningful storyline rather than one that is boring and respective that the audience will easily forget.

Improvements - Clear Narrative, High Quality.

We have already made a plan to address the narrative but to ensure that the video is of high quality we will try to ensure that the camera that we use to record footage is of a good standard and is always in focus when we film or when we are selecting shots to use.

If we were to do the questionaire again I would probably only use a demographic of Tame Impala or fans of the Pychedelic Rock genre as these are members who will mainly feature within our target audience whom we need to entertain and produce the music video for rather than just people who are at random and who properly are fans of more mainstream genres such as pop or rock.