Audience research Write up

Research Aims & Hypothesis Our target audience is the from the range of teenagers to people in their 40’s and 50’s, as these are the people most likely to be interested in crime dramas. Our target demographic is mainly going to be men as the genre seems slightly more focused to them. The main groups will most likely be people from middle to upper class. Factors like race or sexual orientation will not be a considered they wont be key parts of the plot, however hopefully incorporating some actors with that background will draw in that demographic. The aims of the audience research is to see what our audience likes and what they want to see on a show. We asked them genre related questions to see what our age demographic would be interested in. We expect to find some of the things they are going to want to see, as well as hopefully a base of an idea of what the plot/story will be. We can also hopefully find out what the audience want the characters and setting to be like, as well as what content they would like to see in the opening sequence of the show.

Methodology How we did it. In total, we got 20 respondents to our survey on Survey Monkey. We chose our respondents by posting it on social media and asking friends and family to complete it for us. We thought this was the best way to distribute it and guarantee answers. We designed it to be open and closed questions so everyone can answer. We kept it short and to only 10 questions to keep people interested. We designed it so it was based on genre and so we could get the answers based around our genre. The focus group was everyone who is interested in films and TV shows. We carried out the survey on Survey Monkey and distributed it on social media. This would be the best way as we could reach the most people. A problem we encountered would be the lack of time to collect as many results as possible. If we were to do it again I would suggest we make the questions more focused on our genre.

Findings – Closed Questions This one simply states the gender of the recipients This graph shows the age of the respondents of the survey

The graph on the left shows a choice of answers of why a specific genre is a persons favorite, the graph on the right is the opposite and shows why a certain genre is someone’s least favorite

The one on the left shows how often people watch films, and the graph on the right depicts whether a person would watch a film if their favorite actor was in it

Findings – Open Questions There a a few re-occurring themes, for example, in people’s favorite genre, one that constantly appears is comedy. Suggesting people like humor in films. In addition, to the least favorite genre, rom-com came up a lot and so did musicals as they were seen as ‘sappy’ or ‘boring’. However, considering most of the people we asked were boys, this was expected. In response to the crime drama question, people, were expecting death and plot twists as the most common feature. As well as levels of action and violence such as blood, which would capture a horror sub genre.

Analysis We have learnt from the research that people like comedy as their favorite genre, and the majority of people who are likely to watch are from a male audience. People are expecting action and plot twists from the media text, they want horror aspects and it to be based around detective work. They don’t want cheesy scripts and clearly not like musicals or happy songs, they want it to be darker. They engage by watching films and shows quite frequently. This helps us with ideas for marketing as we now know what they want so we can focus on advertising this for our text. We need to use creative skills such creating suspense and using smart dialogue. The findings matched my expectations as I was thinking people would want those things from crime dramas.

Conclusion From gathering our audience research we can make a fairly decent assumption of what our audience will want from our media text. We can see that they want a suspenseful drama with serious crimes with a good narrative, they want plot twists and something that will create tension. We can see they watch lots of films so they know what they want. A majority like comedy. Also a majority hate romance so we will steer away from forced romance. Overall, we will try and stick to what our audience want from our media text.