Analyse one of your media productions in relation to audience

Julian Mcdougall states in relation to media audience that "It's getting harder to conceive a media audience as a stable identifiable group" meaning they are continually changing and what may be our main target audience now may change in the future. We needed however to focus on our target audience for the meantime and once we decided that our genre was going to be Pop with a side genre of dance as we chosen the video "It's All About Tonight" by Pixie Lott we realized that our main target audience was a mainstream audience. Specifically our audience was young males and females within their late teens to late twenties as the video focuses on female empowerment to attract the female audience and is also seen within the male gaze by Laura Mulvey to attract the male audience.

As Hartley states its highly important for a producer of a music video to "know their audience so that they can target them effectively" this being said, we knew that our coursework project to produce a music video for the pop genre had to be centered around audience and what they wanted to see within the video. He follows that "institutions are obliged not only to speak about an audience but crucially talk to them aswell and enter relations with them." With this been said we began to look into our genre by looking through various websites involving Facebook and Twitter as well as the Capital website (notorious for its mainstream pop music theme) in order to identify the type of people who fit with my target audience and what they wanted to see. After I realized the mainstream theme of females and males aged late teens to late twenties fit with my genre and choice of song I created an audience profile for each gender discussing the types of things they enjoy and the characteristics they have. These included going out, parties, make up and nice clothing for the females and going out, parties and having an attractive female present in videos for the males. We then furthered our audience research by creating a video where we interviewed each gender who fit within the right age bracket to tell us the kind of things they would expect and what to see within a pop genre video. Here we were able to ask specific questions in order to gain an audience members opinion to give our audience exactly what they want within our video and found that often within the pop genre the video contents are exciting yet easy to understand, involve a central character and are fun to watch. This began our journey in order to plan our music video which we molded an appropriate storyline for after receiving this feedback.

Dick Hebdige states that "music videos should show sub cultures for the genre" in which we understood that we needed to show relevant props and locations which our mainstream audience where familiar with in order to like and enjoy it. The theme we decided to have for our video was the main artist going out to a party in which she is shown in various locations wearing going out sophisticated outfits and heels as well as make up and fashionable hairstyles. All of these subcultures are ones which target our audience as they are enjoyable things they relate to within their lives and are what young people associate with making the video appeal to them. In order to target what are audience wanted within the pop genre we knew we had to look at audience feedback and so searched for the most popular mainstream videos with the largest amount of hits on Youtube such as Beyonce, Katy Perry and Rihanna's videos. All of which we realized had these characteristics involved in which the main artist was an attractive confident female showing empowerment and going out for a night out or a party within the video. We then knew that a main stream audience are big fans of this narrative within a music video with the artist always being centrally focused and wearing nice clothing within meat shots to make female viewers feel empowered and attract the male gaze. Having these key characteristics are what attract our audience to the video and previous videos within the pop genre.

McQuail makes a point of the use of gratifications as videos can be used "for a diversion or escapism for the audience in which they can build a personal relationship with the artist and narrative."  I believe the video gives a personal identification with the representations on display to the viewer in order for them to relate to the video but emphasizes certain points in order to give an escapism for the viewer. For example the bar, clothing, makeup and heels shown within the video are things the audience are familiar with in every day life but the convertible and hottub are used as an escapism for the audience to feel like they are involved within a wealthy lifestyle with things they make not be as familiar with in every day life but that are used to promote the star image. Stuart Hall states that "depending on the audience depends on what reading is found, our dominant reading was for women to feel empowered and confident, excited for a night out and forgetting about all past relationships which had ended.  This is shown through the narrative of the artist always centrally focused looking happy and empowered at certain locations as if at a party/ down town. Though this is our dominant reading for our main target audience which is young females some minorities of our audience may get different readings such  as males who may just pay attention to the female persona and her attraction rather than a concept.