Audience essay

Apply the concept of audience to one of your media productions.

All media types have consumers. The group of consumers will be varied depending on the type of media and the age groups, social class, life style and interests of the consumer. Hereinafter I will explore the consumption of my media texts both my ancillary texts including my digipak and website and my indie-rock music video created for my year 13 coursework.

Once deciding our genre and themes for our music video we had to target an audience for the consumption of our music video. To find our target audience we looked at different age groups and what types of media different age groups consume, we then tailored our advertisement and video to these types of media which would be consumed by our age group which we decided would be older teens. An audience consumes texts in various ways depending on their age group and their exposure to media types. Our target audience of older teens have a large exposure to social media and online digital technology we used this as below the line marketing of our brand. Social media was an easy to use but effective way to communicate with our audience. We made all of our advertisement and also our final product available digital on various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, twitter and YouTube as we found these were the most used social medias. 

An audience will choose to consume certain text depending on their age, gender, interests and various amounts of other exogenous factors, a key feature to look at when exploring texts consumed by an audience is the hypodermic model which involves ‘injecting’ information into the audience which directly received and accepted by the target audience, we did not use this theory as our media product was solely for entertainment purposes.

Uses and gratifications theory looks at why an audience seek out specific medias to satisfy certain needs, we used this theory to our advantage. Our music video was created for entertainment purposes and targeted an audience which Would seek out medias for their entertainment needs. Music videos follow three types of narrative, a narrative and story, a performance video or concept video. Our music video is mainly based on performance and therefor holds no real meaning other than aesthetics and entertainment whilst listening to our artists music. Consumers of music videos are interested to see the imagery that goes with the music video and the artist they are typically interested in; our music video follows this idea that our consumers would watch the video to see aesthetics and also to follow our constructed artist. our music video brand clearly matches our artist branding and the synergy for the rest of our products meaning fans of Isla who is our constructed artist will find entertainment in watching our music video and looking at our ancillary texts finding more about our artists music and personality for their entertainment.

The reception theory is the idea that a text is not accepted by an audience on the topics and texts itself but is constructed up within the relationship to how the audience receives the text depending on an individual’s background and life experiences. This theory did not greatly apply to my music video as there was no hidden meaning or narrative it was mainly performance although the reception theory may vary the audience type which likes our kind of video there isn’t many ways in which our video can be taken, it is bold and the aesthetics are decretive, we constructed our video to look aesthetically  pleasing to our audience rather than to be factual or to leave a lasting impact o our audience in a way that would provoke different views.