What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Before starting the planning for my media campaign, I first had to define my target audience in order to tailor my products to fit their expectations and include additional items that may be of interest to my target audience.To understand just who was interested in my blog and what genre of music they preferred I created a blog poll to asses whether to aim my campaign at a  male or female audience and of what age. I emailed a link to my blog to all the students at Wyke college and asked them to take the quick poll. This poll helped me to understand what narrative choices people of late teenage years like to see in music videos. Several other questions created on my blog included:

Are you male or female?
What age are you?
How often do you listen to music?
What type of music do you listen to?

what type of narrative do you prefer to see in  music video?


Of all the number of people that took my blog 95% were female and 5% were male which could have given me a biased result in interpreting my blog poll. 95% of the participants said they listen to music everyday and 57% they preferred the indie rock genre, supporting my statement that indie rock is becoming more popular to the female audience. 60% of the participants said that they preferred narrative in a music video which fulled be decision to create a narrative music video initially.However, during my project I decided to combine abstract and performance allowing me to present my target audience with something new and following the conventions of indie rock with the performance element.

 

Once I had a rough idea of who I was going to aim my media campaign at I then created a prezi that stated exactly who I chose as my target audience and my reasoning's, such as demographics. I then assessed what other interests they had and created an audience profile that features other factors of interest that this particular audience who like indie rock music are interested in such as Clothing, food items,places to visit and entertainment. My audience profile was an element of my research that I could continue to refer back to when choosing the clothing choices and planning the mise en scene for my media texts.




During the process of creating my campaign, at each stage of a completed draft I created an audience feedback questionnaire that allowed me to assess if my target audience felt my ancillary text was effective in reflecting the genre of indie rock. Additionally I wanted to find out whether they liked the main image and whether they felt as thought the advertisement gave them all the information they needed to know about the album. As my media product was aimed at my target audience I felt as though I needed their input into improvements I could make and what elements they felt were effective.Details into how I used audience feedback and how I learnt from it in relation to my magazine advertisement is explained in the prezi below. Audience feedback played a huge part in me creating a campaign that was tailored to the interests and the views of my target audience and without it I would not have been able to create the products I have to the best of their ability. 

 

I asked two females that were in my target audience age range which magazine advertisement they preferred and why. This helped me understand my target audience and what they felt were effective elements of my ancillary text.

A suggestion from my audience feedback on the name of my band stemmed from the first draft of my magazine advertisement. It was suggested that the name did not quite fit the abstract feel to the campaign and the elements of New York that tied it all together as a whole campaign. I took on board this feedback and created a questionnaire that had several different band name ideas that I administered to a selection of my target audience. From this feedback I would choose my band name. The response I got from my audience feedback was very helpful and there was a unanimous vote against the particular name 'New New York' so therefore I devised a logo and this then became my band name and featured throughout my campaign.

From my audience feedback I found that the name of a band says a lot about the genre and about the type of music they produced and what the band associate with. This is something that never occurred to me prior to doing my audience research.

My first draft of my digipak reflected my first draft of my magazine advertisement as it had the same image and had the same idea of the white text box contrasting the black writing. I chose to use the same style on both of my ancillary texts as I felt it would create audience recognition between the two thus creating continuity throughout my campaign. The back cover of my digipak featured white text and all the conventions of a back cover in the industry. The inside images of my digipak were all the same images and looked very bland and boring.
After completion of my first draft I then asked my audience again if they knew what the conventions of a digipak was and if they thought I had stuck to them. I also asked my audience what they thought worked well on my digipak and what they didn't, additionally I asked them what they thought I could improve on and again if they could recognize the genre of my digipak.

Overall Feedback
Positives:

• The title of the album placed on the white box is effective
• The barcode is conventional

Negatives:

• The images need to be different
• more interesting images
• sample with the text being on a different colored background
• needs a spine for it to look industry material

I then followed the same process as my magazine advertisement by altering the negative comments and carrying over the positive comments to another drafted version of my digipak. Once I felt this was completed, I then presented my target audience with the same questionnaire and then analysed their feedback. Without the feedback of my target audience I would not have been able to make the suggested improvements and improved my work for the better.

From analysing the conventions of magazine advertisements and digipaks I found it was conventional to use the same image on both the magazine advertisement and the front cover of a digipak. This is to create recognition between the products for my audience if they were to try and locate the album from viewing the magazine advertisement. It was this reason that I intended to keep the same images from my magazine advertisements and use the again on the digipaks.  A suggestion to improve was to use all different images inside the digipak to make it more interesting for the audience. I made this improvement to my digipak as well as the other suggested improvements of reducing the opacity of the white box. I changed the layout and the styling of the back cover and also changed the record label I thought my album would be published by, from 'XL Recordings' to 'Atlantic',due to the nature of the record label and the existing artists. However, this time before asking for audience feedback I created a third digipak with a different back cover and styling for my audience to analyse and see which digipak they preferred in comparison to each other.

The preferred digipak was the digipak with the central park back cover with the yellow iconic taxi, however it was suggested that the front cover could have an addition of the band name added in order for the audience to create recognition between the band and the album. So with this feedback in mind I again made the changes and created my final digipak.
                                         

Alongside my audience feedback questionnaires collected throughout my drafting of my ancillary texts I also asked for feedback for my music video drafting process and for the finished product. I chose to video a group of individuals who fit my target audience of males and females from the age of 17-27, as I thought this was a way of getting more direct and honest feedback about my product. I conducted a focus group asking them a series of questions such as:


Feedback for my digipaks.

Feedback for my music video.

• What do you think of my music video?
• Do you think you would see it featured in the existing industry?
• Do you think the editing looks effective?
• What improvements would you make to my music video?
• what stands out to you the most?
• What genre do you think my music video is?

I also asked a class of 25 students for feedback on my music video and this sis an example of some of the feedback I received.

My feedback helped me to improve my music video to make it look as though it was apart of the indie rock genre with the suggested color change of the performance element. I got positive feedback on the editing and was really happy with the feedback. However, 2 audience feedback sheets wrongly identified the genre of my music video and said they thought it was either Hip-Hop or RnB/Rap. This confused me as I thought I had portrayed my music video to be part of the indie rock genre so this feedback influenced me to edit the music video to include darker shadow and highlights on the performance element as this is a convention on indie rock.