The concept of audience is defined by a group of people who observe and attend to a production. Audience can be narrowed down into certain target audiences, varying from age group, gender and the audience’s interests and dislikes. The production is then broken down by the audience using the effects model, the uses and gratifications model, and the reception theory.
For A2, we created a music video. Our music video was focused on one female artist, who we named Nova. The genre was pop/ R&B, therefore we made the music video colourful and focused on Nova and her dancing – the video was a performance video which did not have a narrative.
We had planned this video with audience as a main priority for the designing process. We did this in order to have a strong correlation between the video and the target audience. Our target audience for the music video was young teenagers to young adults (aged 12 – 24).
There are three main theories which covers what happens, why and how audience consume texts.
The audience theory of the Effects model states the audience is very straightforwardly modelled, in the fact that they will replicate the behaviours which they observe through productions. The effects model is exemplified by Bandura’s study of the Bobo doll, of which children who observed an adult hitting the doll, would then imitate that aggressive behaviour. Thus, suggesting the audience of a production will imitate what they observe.
Similarly, the Hypodermic model is a theory of audience which suggests media can influence the audience powerfully and directly through ‘injecting’ them with messages which trigger the desired response (hence the nickname “hypodermic needle”). It states the audience is powerless from resisting media messages due to there being no other source of opposing information at hand.
We then studied the Uses and Gratifications model during the research stage of our production. This study explains the functions of media across society, and the main assumption of this study is that the audience seek media in order to satisfy individual requirements. It explains how individuals use communication to gratify their needs, discerns motives for media use, and identifies the positive and negative media use consequences.
Finally, we studied Hall’s Reception theory which states media texts are both encoded, by messages being encoded into the media, and decoded by the audience decoding these encoded messages. However, during the decoding stages, the audience may decode the messages differently than the producer’s original intentions. This theory states the audience is allotted into one of three positions upon decoding of a text. Firstly, is Preferred Reading: this is when the audience decodes the media to how the producer desires, which mostly happens when the messages are clear and the reader is in the target audience. Secondly, is Negotiated Reading. This is a compromise interpretation of which the audience accepts the media’s views, but also has other views which are opposing. Lastly, is Oppositional reading, which is when the audience completely rejects the media’s encoded messages, and will create their own reading of the text. This takes place when a media contains controversial topic, or if the narrative is complexed and difficult to follow along to. Additionally, if the audience has a different culture/ background than the proposed target audience for the media.
As a group, we targeted our audience throughout the whole process of our production. As our target audience was 12 – 24 year olds, we researched into the current pop culture likes and dislikes of people of this age range – which we used in order to create the main conventions of our music video. These conventions were the use of bright colours, a focus on dancing, and using current popular outfit trends. The audience responded preferably to this, as in the target audience feedback, there were many positive comments on these attributes to the video.
The audience feedback tool we used was an online website called Survey Monkey. This allowed us to create our own survey and instantly email it to the desired recipients. This digital convenience permitted us to have a larger sample for the audience feedback – allowing a more precise and majoritive view of our production.
In conclusion, the research into audience theorists, conventions and feedback allowed us to create a production that was far more precisely corresponding to our target audience. This meant that our final production was successful in terms of audience.
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