Evaluation Question 3 - Audience

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback gives us a direct insight into our target and secondary audiences and their views and critique on our texts, especially our music video. Through the production process of our texts we gathered constant audience feedback, gradually collecting this indicated exactly what we needed to achieve. We noticed that everyone had very different views and a combination of the target and secondary audiences ideas and feedback gave the best end result. 

When creating our products we had two target audiences in mind:

CORE AUDIENCE:

Our core audience is female 13-18 year olds. Mainly looking at the teen audience as popular music tends to most popular with this age range. As Atomic Kitten had a reunion 2013, this target audience also covers their band from when they were popular in the 90s and this audience will be interested in the 'new bonus tracks' we advertised on our digipak and magazine ads. This age dominates the people listening and buying chart music, and as we would hope there new songs would be in the charts we would want to target this audience. 

SECONDARY AUDIENCES:

Our secondary target audiences is the 'tween' audience, 8-12 year olds. When creating our video we made sure that our characters and artist stayed quite innocent in order to appeal to this secondary audience. This is also the age that the core audience would have been when Atomic Kitten was originally popular, so we know that they appealed to this age range in the past, and should still now. Another secondary audience we have is 19-24+, Atomic Kitten have been on TV spots like 'Loose Women', the demographic for this TV show being anchored clearly as middle aged women, definitely not our target audience. Our final secondary audience is men as we still are trying to appeal to aMASS MARKET. We did this by using aspects of the 'male gaze' theory, to try and get interest from a male demographic. Atomic Kitten also appealed to a mass market in the past, objectifying themselves in their videos. 

When researching the audience for Atomic Kitten and pop artists in general we found that they mostly target the female audience, usually teens. To promote their music they either appeared on radio spots or TV spots. They had a clear secondary audience as a lot of them also appeared in men's magazines such as 'Nuts' and 'FHM'. Compared to a lot of girl groups Atomic Kitten did seem to convey a certain amount innocence and stayed mostly true to the teen audience. However, there was definite uses of the male gaze theory in their videos.

The most successful way we found of gathering audience feedback was to show the individual or group our video or ancillary text and then proceed to film their reaction and ask them questions regarding this. This kind of feedback is good to look back on as from re-watching the video we can quickly remember the age, gender, and some of the other interests they may have through watching the video. Here is an example of audience feedback we gathered in this way.

As some people didn't want to be on video we just recorded their voices giving us feedback. As we wanted to gather as much audience feedback as possible, any kind of feedback, whatever form we were  given it in we were grateful for. 

One of the main ways we got constant audience feedback was through getting feedback from our media class. They are all in our primary target audience age range, and there are also a lot of boys in the class, making it easier for us to see if our texts apply to a mass market like we have hoped they would. Also by asking the media class we know they are very knowledgeable about the technology specifics that go into making our video, and therefore their feedback is very useful as it is direct and can be particular to an effect or tool we used when creating the texts. With them being accessible in every media class just to spare a few minutes to give feedback, although it wasn't all formally recorded like other feedback was from non class members, we could tweek certain aspects there and then making our texts always be improving and receiving constructive criticism.

The most important thing we gained from audience feedback was that original idea wasn't working. We were told from various different people, of different age ranges and gender that the narrative in our original rough cuts was not believable and it looked like a very 'student made' video and didn't have the professional feel that our video needed in order to be successful. We were also told that the cast in the video were not convincing or 'sassy' enough to look like a genuine girl band. From taking note from this feedback we made an attempt to try and salvage the video, however it just seemed to continue not to work, even after multiple reshoots. We had a big group discussion and decided that instead we should change to a british girl group, instead of the original 'Pussycat Dolls'. We did this because compared to the American girl groups, the British ones tend to be a lot less provocative therefore it would make it a lot easier for our performance sections convincing. We chose the group Atomic Kitten as they reunited in 2013 making them very relevant and had the fan support to help us with gathering audience feedback. As we chose an upbeat ballad style song as our new idea we had to do fresh audience research to develop the conventions and style that we would need to portray.

When pitching our new idea we got a lot of feedback on how to develop our ideas and they gave us some additional good narrative ideas, as well as helping us to anchor our idea so we could start to plan in depth our new idea, as we were at this point getting close to deadlines and needed to work fast and efficiently to get everything done. Luckily, this track is the same genre (pop) as our first idea so we could use a lot of the audience research we already had and some of the audience feedback that were telling us what works effectively for a pop girl group. 

We used Fan Forums and Websites to get audience feedback, as well as to research our artist, genre and audience. On these fan forums such as 'fanpop' we would ask the fans questions and also display our rough cuts here. This was very useful as we knew that the people who were responding to this feedback genuinely cared about the outcome of our video and wanted Atomic Kitten to be portrayed in a positive light. However, on a lot of fan forums we didn't get very much response so we tended to opt to get feedback from social networking sites, as they are more widely used.

The theory of Web 2.0 and websites and the internet becoming interactive and user generated reflects the way we gathered audience feedback. Websites such as YouTube and Blogger have very active comment sections, helping us gather instant feedback and it being very easy to screenshot and evidence when displaying the feedback we get and also sharing it with the rest of our group. Other social networking websites such as Twitter and Instagram also were very useful in this aspect, especially twitter as we can instantly get messages out to our audience as well as them giving us instant feedback also. It also helped us to know our audience on a more personal level and recognise the people that consistently give us feedback and comment on the progress we are making with constructive points or praise. However, social networking sites are very vast and this means that it is difficult to target a niche market on them. To overcome this problem we added tags to our work to make sure that the audience that are interested in what we are producing can easily find us.

Here are some examples of the audience feedback we received and how we acted on this feedback. One piece of feedback we gathered that was one of the most useful was that the shots of us laughing could work very effectively. Even though this is a common convention with boy bands, showing them 'messing about' and having a laugh, this also gave our video a more lighthearted feel. We also had a lot of this footage already from outtakes of our shoots, and this was a great and effective way of utilising this footage. This feedback also really helped with our ancillary texts as well as our music video. Due to this positive feedback of a one off shot of us laughing in our main video we chose to use a similar image of us laughing and smiling as the front cover of our digipak. We also got good feedback from this saying it worked effectively here also. 

We have also had a lot of negative feedback that has really helped us improve our work. An example of this is that we hadn't edited out any shaky shots that had accidentally been left in our video. Due to us being so deep in editing we often failed to notice them and had been concentrating on the cutting and effects rather than basic features that make a music video look unprofessional such as shaky shots. As soon as we were informed about this from various different people we extensively went through our video, noting down any shaky shots shown and either replacing them with alternative footage shots, stabilising them using tools on final cut pro or doing our best to cross cut away from them. This made a big impact on how professional our video came across and how neat it looked. When having to carefully cut the video to avoid this we also took the opportunity to cut more to the beat as this was also some feedback that we received. By gathering a number of different peoples feedback at once, by asking a large group we could look at our video and evaluate which of these points were useful and edit in all their points accordingly. This saved a lot of time doing it this way and also meant that each of our rough cuts significantly had changed. 

An example of how we used  and really utilised our audience feedback was when we were undecided about the ending of our video. We had two alternative endings, which we were very undecided about so we made a short vodcast showing both endings. We then showed this video to our target audience, gathering feedback on which they thought was the better ending. Eventually we decided on ending the video with the three members of the girl group, as this was the more popular choice when asking audience members. This audience feedback ended up being very valuable to the success and end result of our video.

Our first rough cut had significantly less effects than our final cut. When delivering our first rough cut to our audience, mainly our media class, they said that we needed to experiment more with the vast range of effects that final cut pro has to offer. After doing this we realised that transitions and additional effects didn't clutter our work like we presumed they would but instead improved them, making our video flow better and show a good contrast between the narrative and performance sections specifically. 

We also got extensive feedback on our ancillary texts. It was very easy and useful to get feedback on our ancillary texts as they are just one image being shown rather than a video, and we could display multiple images on a page and ask the audience to pick out their favourite or give feedback on them all. From this feedback we changed a number of image chosen for our magazine ads. Originally we had a image of half of one of the band members faces. Our audience research revealed that they didn't think this was effecting and an extreme long shot with that member of the band in a feminine pose was much more effective and professional looking. Some of the feedback we received on the digipak we also rejected though. Looking at past Atomic Kitten videos we noticed on their digipaks they tended to for a very simplistic look. We also wanted to do this, as it also made the digipak look very clean cut and professional. We thought that by over complicating the image it would start to look messy and when viewing it it would be hard to concentrate on the main features we wanted to draw attention to, for example the main image and artists name. Our audience feedback suggested that we layer more complex images and make the image, on the inside especially, a lot more dynamic and have a lot more going on. We disagreed with this and thought that the multiple layering of the petals and candles were effective enough and anything more may ruin the aesthetics of the digipak and the simple theme we carried across all our ancillary texts. 

The Uses and Gratifications theory (mainly Blumler and Katz) states that the power lies with the audience, not the producers. This theory helps to emphasise what audiences do with media texts, whether they choose to reject or use them. As the audience are in control of how they consume it helps people with issues such as relaxation, emotional satisfaction and other issues such as personal and social identity. By getting constant feedback throughout the production of our texts we can learn about how the audience are responding to our text and whether it deals with any of the issues above and whether they reject or use it. By knowing the audiences reaction we can help to improve parts of our video to for example create emotional satisfaction. This also links into Stuart Hall's theory of how the audience read a text and whether they understand the preferred reading which the producers hopes comes across. As we used little intertextuality in our video, we think that the audience is likely to get the preferred reading of our video and easily follow the narrative that runs throughout it. This is one of the questions that we specifically asked our audience when getting feedback and all of the people we asked said they completely understood what was going on and took on our preferred reading. I think this is mainly due to when we first started editing we initially made a linear cut of the narrative to make sure it had continuity and would work as a continuous story line being watched. 

Despite getting feedback from people in person being an effective way of gathering feedback, the growing impact of digitisation helps us to gain feedback on a much larger scale. Due to all the feedback we gathered it helped us to improve our products to the standard we were eventually happy with and that become our eventual final products. Audience feedback helps blur the line between audience and producer, making our products more user generated as the audience influenced the outcome of the video and ancillary texts. Without our audience feedback the view we had of our products would have been very biased and we may have struggled to have the level of self criticism necessary to make the texts as effective as possible. Also as we are all female in the group it was very important to get a constant male perspective to make sure the mass market was always being considered and targeted. When creating a product you can often get very into it and zone out. Because of this deep concentration there may be key aspects wrong with the text that you are overlooking in order to finish the part you are working on. By asking people for audience feedback it also allowed us to stand back and look at our work whilst other people were and gave us more of an opportunity to be self critical and evaluate how successful certain parts were and the audiences reaction to the video.