Target Audience

A target audience is the intended audience or readership of a publication, advertisement, or other message. In marketing and advertising, it is a particular group of consumers within the predetermined target market, identified as the targets or recipients for a particular advertisement or message. The production team must identify and understand its target audience if their advertising campaign is to be successful. It allows the production to craft their advertisements to the wants and needs of customers, in order to maximize ticket sales and therefore revenue.

So before I begin to write a story plot and craft an advertisement campaign about my short film I need to establish who my film will be aimed at and what sort of traits they possess, i.e. music interests and more. This will provide vital information for my advertisement campaign and increase the amount of ticket sales for my film.

   

The first stage I took to discovering what target audience I would be aiming at was by coming up with a quick break down of the qualities they would possess. As you can see from the first picture I have provided below I broke my target audience into 5 main categories, which included gender, occupation, age, products they would stereotypically use (types of technology) and general interests (music, etc). At this point in my production I have already established that I will be creating a comedy short film. So when it came to identifying the general interests of both genders I only mentioned interests towards comedy. I felt this was a good decision because it will provide an insight into what story plot I should create that would best reach both genders, thus increasing the amount of people that would be interested in my film and therefore increase the films overall success.   

Once I had created a rough idea of who my target audience should be I then searched for some images online that I could include in my target audience board in order to clearly show who my target audience is. There was no particular reason to include these images other than making it clearer to other people who my target audience is, as I have been told that my format of writing down and processing information can be difficult to understand if viewed by other people. This was important to notify and act upon because if I require help from another person to create a poster or other piece of advertisement for my film and I cannot accurately convey the target audience I am reaching then it means my advertisement will not properly reach my intended audience, thus decreasing the amount of viewers of my film. Below I have included a picture that shows all the pictures used in my target audience board.  

Once I had all the material and information I required to create my target audience board all I had to do was create it. Below I have included a picture of the final product. As you can see there is a lot of useful information that is applicable to my production. For example, the type of comedy shows that my target audience (16 - 25 year olds) watch tend to be highly relatable. As you can see television shows such as 'The Office' (situated in an office of a paper company) and 'The Inbetweeners' (situated in a high school) are very popular amongst this audience. This is primarily due to the fact that the areas these shows take place in are highly familiar because the majority of the target audience will have/still attend a standard high school or have/currently work in a standard 9 - 5 job. This familiarity is key to their success because the target audience could imagine themselves in the hilarious scenarios depicted on screen. This is useful information because when it comes to the writing process and selecting a story plot I shall need to consider how relatable the film would be to my target audience. 

To conclude, I think this was a really useful document to produce because it will help me to make decisions as to what to include in my short film.