Applying audience theories to your product

Me and my partner, Charlotte, created a music video to Taylor Swift's song 'Forever and Always'. Our target audience was girls aged between 13-21 as we felt the themes and issues we were highlighting in our video, would be relatable for them. For example, we have used an 18 year old female to play the role of the main star; her look would potentially be idolised by the younger target audience and seen as admiral to the higher end of our audience.
The uses and gratifications model is a relevant theory for our video. The area of identification is relevant in that young girls can find aspects of their own personalities in the main character and potentially view her as a role model in how to deal with broken relationships since she acts as a sign of hope; an area we highlighted with the lit candle at the end of our video. The area of diversion can also be applied; our video provides the opportunity to temporarily escape into a different lifestyle and be entertained; therefore distracting us from worries and problems surrounding our own lives. Our audience is not passive, but active and feel sympathetic towards the relationship break up and feel pathos towards the girl. We have conveyed the female character as innocent and vulnerable which heightens the sense of sympathy from the audience.

Morley's theory of an active audience can be applied to our video. The audience view the text and then formulate an opinion based on what they see. A preferred reading of our text could be that the themes we raise are relatable and the audience share the reaction of the break up with the main star. An oppositional reading could be that our narrative is unrealistic and exaggerated and the audience think that we have created a hyper-real situation. A negotiated reading of our text could be that the audience recognise the break up as sad, however they cannot relate to it and therefore don't connect with the narrative on an emotional level.

Our audience feedback was extremely useful as it allowed us to collect feedback from our target audience and see their initial response to what we had produced. A lot of issues that arose from our first draft video were based around problems with mise-en-scene and camera angles therefore we were able to go back and correct these to improve the experience for our target audience.

Overall, I feel that our product appealed to our target audience because we used a narrative that is relatable and perhaps a major issue within the age bracket we aimed to target. The simplicity of the narrative makes it easy to watch and understand, again linking to the diversion section of the uses and gratifications model, making it entertaining to watch.