Evaluation 4 - Audience feedback

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?


For my audience feedback I found it would be most beneficial to plan my feedback in terms using a range of ways to collect it and focusing on my target audience.


Interviews

My first form of collecting this feedback was through the process of interviews. When planning what kind of interview I would use I looked at how I wanted use the feedback in terms of creating an idea of how successful my production is. In order to discover if my video

1) Appeals to the desired target audience
2) Fits the codes and conventions of its intended Genre
3) Presents its themes and concepts
4) Has an understandable narrative
5) How well the Digipak accompanies the video

These are the four main points I planned to achieve with my video and so I planned to base my questions around these so therefore I decided I would ask my volunteers the same planned questions and see how they respond.

My questions...

• Do you think this video fits the indie/dance/alternative genre? why?
• Who do you think this video is aimed at in terms of target audience?
• Do you understand the narrative of the video? What are your interpretations of the narrative?
• What themes and concepts do the think are portrayed in this video?
• Do you find the Digipak suited the video and its genre?
• Do you think both the video and Digipak could be a real media product?
• Do you have any additional comments?

I chose my participants in terms of age therefore my video is aimed at more teenagers but also chose to interview one older participant to compare answers. 

These are my interviews and what I learnt from their feedback

Francines responses are innovative and helpful. From this interview I learnt that

• Our themes and concepts are strong
• Our editing is effective and different
• Our suitability for our genre is strong
• Our video has a profesional finish

The responses from Natasha were very similar and I found that again our concepts were strong. What i learnt from this interview is that

• Our narrative isn't clear
• Our video is different and 'edgy'

Georgias responses are very similar and in some way a combination of the two above.



Overall what I learnt from these interviews are...

• What we could have improved is our narrative
• What we achieved well is the quality of our video and out concept.

Questionnaires 

This is a questionnaire that I created that I emailed to 20 people who I considered to be part of my target audience.

I decided that I wanted to gain some numerical feedback that I could input in to graphs therefore I chose to use the yes/no answer option. This allowed me to put the answers for each question in to a graph. I structured the questions so that an answer of yes meant success in achieving what the answer suggests and no meant we did not in the participants opinion.

These are my results of from the 20 participants that answered the questions

The response for this question is mostly positive as results show 85% of people said they enjoyed the video or found it entertaining. From this I have learnt that we were successful in make the video appealing in terms of drawing an audience in. 

Again this response is mostly positive meaning the Digipak worked well and consistently with the video to effectively create a good media package. 

This is a mainly positive response however it is not as successful as the last results. 40% of people felt the video did NOT suit the song. When creating our production song choice became an issue in terms of suiting the ideas and footage we had meaning we had to change our original song so pick a better suited one. What I learnt from this is that we may have been more successful if we had found a song we really wanted to work with then based our ideas around that rather than the other way around. 

Again this result isn't as impressive as it means almost have of the participants did NOT find that control and freedom came across as a main theme in our video. This could be because we focused so much on making youth and identity a theme that these concepts became to overshadowed. One thing I have learnt from this is to maybe not make the concepts and themes to complicated and stick to a solid few. 

Question 5 showed excellent results with 100% of the participants finding the concept and themes of youth and youth culture clear in the video. This links back to my last comment that we focused greatly on this idea.

This is again a positive result as most people found the theme of identity noticeable in our video. This is something that we made very obvious therefore it was a part of the video that was very visual for example the masks. One thing this has shown me is that possible the most visually striking parts of a production are the most identifiable ones.

This question related to the profitability of our products and whether people would purchase it. It is fairly successful but 30% of people claimed that they would not buy it. However this could be down to the age of downloads and the fact there is no long a necessity to buy music if you wish to listen to it.

The last question referred to how professional and real our media products seemed. The results are mostly positive which shows the minor detail we included did make a difference to the finished result.

Audience theory applied to my results

Stuart hall suggested different readings defined by audiences responses. Of the different readings the one that best applies to my results of my questionnaire would be 

NEGOTIATED READINGS

This means the audience Audiences partially except but are not completely persuaded and are open to other views

I have based this result on the fact for question four , five and six of my questionnaire the responses although mostly positive their were very mixed particularly due to question 4 meaning the understanding wasn't entirely adopted. 

Audience feedback via social networking sites

The rise is social networks has not only proved key for advertising but also for audience research and feedback. Networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have encouraged the expression of opinion over the last few years and this is a prime opportunity for record companies and artist to gain effective feedback. 

I decided to use twitter to gain feedback on the finished video to product by tweeting the link and asking for comments.

By doing this people 'mentioned' the band and responded with their comments

What I learnt from this...

This feedback was positive and although its an effective way of gaining comments people the reply tend to be a person that is 'following' you which often tends to be a fan. This can create a bias result as the comments are more likely to be positive. However I did gain from this small amount of feedback that we were successful in terms of our target audience as viewing the profiles of the respondents showed they were apparently part the age range and character we aimed to appeal to. 

Treatment/pitch

At the start of our coursework we pitched our ideas for our video to the rest of our class. This was effective audience feedback because

• It was physical interaction with our audience and so there was more space for discussion and comments.
• It created a general idea of how people would respond to the video
• It was a visual presentation instead of a questionnaire etc which helped portray our ideas more effectively 

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