Task 1 - What is a Target Audience?

Target Audiences Research

What is an audience?

In film, the audience are the people you are directing your content to. It is the sense of who they are and your idea of them/ what they're like.

How would you define target audience?

The target audience is the type of audience you are directing your content to. This refers to things such as the audience's gender, social class, religion, age, sexuality, nationality and can sometimes also relate to ethnicity.

Why is it useful for a film to have a target audience?

If you have a target audience, you'll know exactly how to shape, market and direct your product, and this helps the audience to chose whether or not they'd be interested in watching a film, because they will know what type of film genre they like, which is generally directed to a certain target audience. In film, it is vital as it will help you determine exactly what your content will look like during pre-production. For example, if you were making a movie about a war, it is likely your audience would be targeted around the male population, who appeal to action as well and being educated on historical events. Here, the content of the movie will never shift to something unrelated, such as girls talking about school or going shopping, because that wouldn't appeal to the film's target audience and make it successful by gaining a film company as much profit as they can.

Which audiences do you think teen dramas appeal to?

We think teen dramas normally appeal to girls aged around 11-24. We say girls because a drama will usually focus on the thoughts, feelings and emotions surrounding people, which females are typically associated with, and the ages we've chosen is closely knitted with the teenagers' age group, and they'd probably feel more like they would relate to the stories and emotions of characters in a teen drama than anyone aged over 30, for example. Since America has the headquarters for most big companies, we would say most audiences who watch teen dramas would come from America/Canada, UK and Australia. We included other countries because we feel as though, since English is the worlds either first or second language, English-speaking countries also have a lot of relevancy in the audience of teen dramas. Of course, this audience's lifestyle and professions would depend on their age, but it is likely they'd either be a student in high school, secondary school or college, maybe working in a part time job. We have decided that their interest will solely depend on that individual, because generalising a whole group of people would highly be unfair, and probably inaccurate.