Having collected a variety of feedback from our pop video and ancillary products from members of the target audience, and from other audience demographics – via YouTube, a Focus Group and Questionnaire, and other sources, I looked to answer this question.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Our target audience was predominantly white, British males between the ages of 16 and 35. We aimed it at As, Bs and possibly Cs on the ‘JICTAR’ Scale (Joint Industry Committee for Television Audience Research). A’s are well educated and upper/upper-middle class and E’s are poorly educated, unemployed lower class. Category B tends to be people who are well educated but not necessarily wealthy, while C’s are normally people from families who are skilled but not educated. So, A would be people like Lawyers, Architects, Surgeons and the wealthy. B would be people like teachers. C would be people like plumbers and electricians, or people that would aspire to be such. We aimed for A’s, B’s and C’s because the song carries some fairly complex messages, including the New World Order conspiracy, and it is necessary to be reasonably well educated to understand a lot of these. It is aimed at British males because it is quite an aggressive style of music and song which we echo in the video. Also the band is British and sings about Britain in relation to politics and society.
YOUTUBE RESPONSE
To obtain audience feedback we uploaded our video onto YouTube. Over five weeks our video was viewed 534 times. We got some positive and some negative feedback, most of which was constructive and therefore helpful in enabling us to evaluate our production. Some examples are:
caz2435
Little bit samey, needed more of a narrative than army guys running around killing everyone, however the lead singer is a perfect fit and personally i think he makes the video. . .
- 9InchesOfNoMercy (in reply to caz2345)
@caz2435 well with most muse songs it's about corrupt government so I'd assume the army going around and killing unnecessarily would fit right in
ZiggyStardust85
It´s a very good selfmade project. I really like it, but just the connection between the band a these army guys is not clear. The army guys want to find them and kill evryone in their way, but why?
FallenCoffee
NICE...wonderful song 5/5 and great video performence
Fluemmel
Marked as spammy respect guys, nice work
FOCUS GROUP
We also organised a Focus Group of 9 seventeen to ninteen year olds (5 girls, 4 boys) we wrote up a questionnaire and let them watch the video a couple of times during which they filled in the questionnaire. After this we went through the questions orally, allowing them to expand more on what they had written. Here is a list of the questions we gave them:
1. What is your general opinion of the video?
2. What, in your opinion, is the overall message of the song?
3. What does the video sat about the band’s image?
4. What do you feel the SWAT team represent?
5. What do you think of the performance?
6. What would you add/take away from the narrative to improve it?
7. How are males and females portrayed in this video?
8. Where you satisfied with the ending? Why?
9. How do you think the violence works in the pop video? Does it fit or not?
We aimed for the questions to be open ones and to get progressively more difficult as we went along. The most popular responses for the questions were:
1. Good, well edited, liked the tempo, good camera angles, good balance of performance and narrative, engaging, mixed opinions on clarity of narrative, good contrast between static nature of performance and shaky effect of narrative
2. Rebellion, violence, destruction, against law and order, rage against authority, serious universal issues like war
3. Youthful, rebellious, anti-authority, strong, serious
4. Harsh reality of modern society (big brother), destructive, bring violence, war and dominate women, law and order putting a stop to rebellion, government
5. Too static, band doesn’t look challenging enough, lots of energy and passion, background was effective and realistic
6. Take away apartment – don’t see the point, more lead up to girl being shot, have SWAT team preparing at start to build more tension
7. Males are clearly dominant, females are weaker, men have typical patriarchal dominance but take it too seriously to the point where its almost comical
8. Satisfied that band escaped the government at great odds, challenged what you thought was going to happen (expected the band to be there and more action to ensue), anti-climax but in a good way, (one person wanted a massive fight between SWAT and band)
9. Too gratuitous, fits with genre of music/image of band, lack of violence may make the video appear dull, keeps audience interested, shows clearly who is good and who is bad.
STUART HALL AND HIS ENCODING/DECODING THEORY
Our pop video took account of two Stuart Hall theories. The first was his concept of social mapping, which argues that media texts must address the areas of thought and concern for their audiences if they are to get a top response. So, young people in our target audience may feel indecisive, threatened by authority, and lacking in freedom and rights. Our song and our band aimed to address precisely that way of thinking. From our YouTube responses, one said:
9InchesOfNoMercy (in reply to caz2345)
@caz2435 well with most muse songs it's about corrupt government so I'd assume the army going around and killing unnecessarily would fit right in
While our focus group confirmed the same with Lottie, 18, saying ‘I understood the band were being rebellious as I often feel like’.
Stuart Hall’s other theory of encoding/decoding and preferred meanings really helped us evaluate our final product. He argues that the producer, us, had a preferred reading that we wanted the audience to get. This was that the government did not want young people to listen to the song and would kill them to stop them doing so. Our SWAT team executes a young woman for this crime in our pop video. But, most of our audience did not understand this. One comment on YouTube was:
ZiggyStardust85
It´s a very good selfmade project. I really like it, but just the connection between the band a these army guys is not clear. The army guys want to find them and kill evryone in their way, but why?
While our focus group concluded that the pop video was about:
The harsh reality of modern society (big brother), destruction, violence, war and domination of women, law and order putting a stop to rebellion, government control
But they too did not understand the relationship between the SWAT team, the song and the execution. In Hall’s terms this is a negotiated meaning rather than a preferred one as the audience take in or accept only part of the message. It may be that some of the audience gives what Hall calls and ‘oppositional meaning’ by rejecting the idea that the government would execute a girl for listening to music.
BLUMLER AND KATZ AND THEIR
‘USES AND GRATIFICATIONS THEORY’
Blumler and Katz’s Gratification model states that the audience consumes media in order to satisfy their own special needs. These special needs are categorized into 4 sections: diversion, personal relationship, personal identity and surveillance. Diversion means that the audience has the chance to escape from everyday pressures by watching something which allows their minds to wander. The personal relationship means that the audience is able to feel a companionship via media personalities and characters and explores sociability through discussion with other people about the media texts. Personal identity means that the audience compares their lives with those of the characters and their situations within the media in order to explore personal problems and gain world perspective. Surveillance means that the media supplies the audience with news about what is going on in the world. In my pop video the target audience watches the video in order to satisfy their special needs of personal identity and personal relationship. The target audience, 15 to 35 year old white males, can feel a sense of companionship with the lead singer in the video as at this age they still have a strong feeling against authority and have maybe been in a different situation where they have had to decide whether or not to make a stand.
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