Evaluation: Audience feedback

"What have you learnt from your audience feedback?"

From creating this media text, this project has taught me the importance of knowing you target audience. Without knowing your target audience and what they like and dislike, it is somewhat impossible to create a successful media product.

Me and Dora were very lucky in the sense that we were members of Kate Nash's target audience, females aged between 16-24 so we already had a good idea to what would and wouldn't work in our music video and ancillary texts. Also, we were fortunate enough to be in a sixth form where half of the population were members of our target audience- so we were able to get an unbiased opinion on options like mis-en-scene, specific costumes, camera movement and sound from a wide variety of people.

Although the other groups in our class found Web 2.0 especially useful for grasping opinions for their target audience, via the mediums of Facebook and Twitter- despite all of our efforts...our social networking pages remained horribly bare except for sweet, yet unhelpful comments such as 'love your hair extensions!' or 'nice video babe!' as a result- me and Dora found it much more effective to take it out to the people with questionaires and Q&A sessions with our target audiences (click here for the questionaire results & click here for a Q&A with a member of our target audience) as this allowed us to achieve direct comments and results that would help us understand how to go about creating a good music video and set of side projects, as well as evaluating whether or not we had been successful in doing so.

In the production stages, the questionaire that we took around sixth form was vital to the mis-en-scene of our video, which is arguably the most important aspect, as music television is 100% visual and we would need to use mis-en-scene the most to both challenge and follow coventions. However, in hindsight- we should have started this process much earlier than we did. From the start we had an idea of making the video very cute and kitsch, with quirky mis-en-scene and a humourous storyline...so we seemed to base all of our research and storyboarding on those aspects. Parisienne Records was very lucky that our target audience believed that was the correct way to go about making this music video. If the results of our questionaire showed that our audience wanted a black and white, understated, serious video- then we would have been in a lot of troubleas our research just wasn't broad enough. If I was to make this project again I would have made target audience feedback and input a huge priority right from the start.

In post production- we learned a lot from our feedback, mostly that we had been successful in creating a fun music video that appealed to our target audience. Despite not relying on Web 2.0 and social networking websites, the 'kind, but unhelpful comments' that I mentioned earlier are still proof that people liked what they saw when they watched our music video on DailyMotion- when we both shared it on our private Facebook accounts- it garnered a lot of likes and positive comments...mostly from people of our target audience. In class screenings, people responded well. However, when it came to a more specific Q&A with a member of our target audience we saw that the gender role reversal was only 'slight' and that we could have afforded to take the storyline a bit further in regards to the girl being a 'player' and to maybe add some shots of the protaganist chatting to her friends about her 'dilemma' but that was their only qualms with it. We were complimented on it being fun, quirky and very fitting of the genre- which was exactly what we were going for. Our ancillary tasks were also deemed very professional and that they drew a lot of paralells with other famous female solo artists like Rihanna and Katy Perry- which shows that our research was not wasted.

If I was to make this project again, I think I would have utilised the Q&A function very early on, as this direct and specific advice coming straight from the mouths of the target audience would have been very effective in making a strong media text. Even though we have recieved positives reviews from our peers, teachers and target audience, there is always room for improvement.