Evaluation : Question 3

What have you learned from your audience research?

To conduct or audience research we first created a survey monkey containing vital questions that would allow us to understand where, if anywhere, we went wrong and what my strong points were concerning the products. Below is an image of the question contained in the survey.

We asked a selection of people to watch the video and showed them the ancillary texts and then we asked them to complete this survey, showing their feedback.

13 out of the 20 people that gave audience feedback were male and all of the participants were either below 18 or between 18 and 24. This is because we aimed for the teenage audience when creating this video. This is due to the fact that teenagers are most associated with pop music than any other age group. When asked what they would rate the video out of 10, 4 of the 20 gave it a 6, 12 of the 20 gave it an 8, 3 people gave it 5 and the remaining 1 person giving the video a 4/10. The majority of people gave the video quite a high rating which allows us to know that we have appealed to the audience well. However the 4 people that gave it 5 and below shows that us we did not reach perfection with the product and it didnt appeal to everyone, however we feel it is almost impossible to please everyone and so a few bad ratings are expected. In future we may attempt to reach a larger audience which may give us better ratings with the audience.

The wordle above was used to illustrate the answers to question 4 which was, 'What did you like most about the video?'. As you can cleary see the most common answers were things such as Fun, Energy, Different. These were what we aimed for when creating the product, to be fun and different from other music videos whilst maintaining conventions of a pop video to ensure we appealed to that audience. This has taught us that maintaining conventions whilst adding your own originality makes your product appeal to an audience and keep their attention as they like to see what they are used to, but they also like to see a twist to keep them interested. We feel we did this effectively as shown by the results of the question.

Question 5 was 'What did you least like about the video?'. This would allow us to take in the negative feedback and ensure that we corrected these things next time. Some of the feedback we received included people saying,

"It was way too repetitive, there needed to be more things in the video."
"Some of the shots were too long, this makes the video boring."
"You should of had more effects"

These comments have taught us that when creating a music video fast paced editing is essential to keep it interesting; especially a pop video as they are supposed to be high energy and fun for the audience. Also the repetitiveness of the video was not appealing to some. In the future we need to ensure we add some variety to the video and make sure the audience do not have to see the same thing over and over as they may get bored of this and this may effect their view of the video. Finally as a group we learnt that effects can make a video more appealing to an audience of teenagers. They like to see different things in a video and not the same as other videos. Effects would have given my video a more unique feel and maybe would have appealed to a wider audience. These are things which I would consider if I was to re-create the video.

Questions 6 and 7 were made to give feedback on the cohesion of the whole product, including the ancillary texts and the music video. Question 6 was 'Do you think the music video related well to the song?'. This was a closed question and so only gave yes or no answers. 16 of the 20 participants said yes, whereby 4 of them said no. This is a good result as it means we created a product that most of the audience thought related to the song. The aim of the video was to express the song and so I feel we have succeeded in this task.

Question 7 was 'Would the music video and ancillary texts(Digipak/Magazine) encourage you to buy the song?'. This was the question that would inform us whether the connection between the ancillary texts and music video was good enough to encourage people to purchase the song which was the main purpose of the products; to promote the artist and entice the audience to want to buy the product. 13 of the 20 said yes to this question. I would consider this a success as in today's music industry the purchasing of music is on a downward spiral and more and more people are downloading illegally  therefore the fact that our media texts would entice a majority of the audience to go and purchase the product is a good sign. However I have learnt that a good video and ancillary texts is not all that is required to promote a song or artist, as 7 of the 20 said no. This is something we may have to work on, next time our group create a media text like this to promote an artist or song we may have to add more features to entice the remaining audience to purchase the product. This could be things such as a competition to win something if you purchase the product, a signed copy of the product, merchandise to go with the product, etc.

Overall I feel that the audience feedback has allowed us to learn what to do next time to improve my product and it has also taught me that a video and ancillary texts are not all that is required to successfully promote a product, however I feel we have been relatively successful as the majority of the audience gave positive feedback.