Audience

What is an audience?
- An individual or collective group of people who read or consume any media text
- Examples: Radio listeners, Television viewers, Newspaper and magazine readers, Web traffic on web sites.
- Can you think of any other types of audiences?
Why are audiences important?
- Without audiences there would be no media.
- Media organizations produce media texts to make profit – no audience=no profit.
- The mass media is becoming more competitive than ever to attract more and more audiences in different ways and stay profitable.
Impact of New Technology on Audiences
- Old media (TV, Print, Radio) which used to have high audience numbers must now work harder to maintain audience numbers.
- Digital technology has also led to an increasing uncertainty over how we define an audience, with the general agreement that a large group of people reading the same thing at the same time is outdated and that audiences are now ‘fragmented’.
Fragmented audience
- The division of audiences into smaller groups due to the variety of media outlets.
- EXAMPLE: Newspapers and magazines – you can now view the hard copy AND online version (sometimes free).
- The aim is to hit as many people as possible/sell more copies/generate a larger audience. But measuring that audience becomes hard! You may have some people that only look online, some that only read the hard copy, or some that do both!

From this we found, as expected, that it was mainly the girls that enjoyed romantic film and the boys that did not. However there were some anomalies in that some of the girls said that the did not enjoy romantic film and some of the boys said that they did. This helps to show us that our genre is not restricted to the female audience and so we should not only target it at females, however the majority of males said they did not like the romantic genre therefore we will primarily target the film at girls.

Most of the negative feedback was due to the genre being seen as repetitive in that the same thing happens in every romantic film. Therefore to improve ours and draw in not only our own target audience but also a wider spread of people we have decided to make ours slightly different in that it is not just a romantic film, it is a hybrid between romantic and teen/coming of age films (e.g. mean girls, clueless etc.) we hope this makes the film more relatable to our target audience.

Negative comments about the genre were also that it is perceived as 'boring' and so to make ours more exciting for our younger audience we have decided to use party scenes to help portray the coming of age side to the genre, this also helps to relate to our ever changing audience, in that teens go to parties from a far younger age these days therefore to appeal to them, it is important to get this more wild aspect to their lives involved in our film because teens are nowadays more likely to relate to and watch hybrid films like American Pie (comedy/ slightly romantic) than films which are only in the romantic genre like The lake house or The Note book, because for the vast majority these are seen as 'boring'.

However all the feedback showed that the audience think the key aspect to a good romantic film is the relationship and romance between the two main characters, therefore we have decided not to make the film too much like a coming of age film and still stick to mainly portraying the romantic side to our film.

http://kirstensasmediablog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/target-audience-romantic-films.html