Blog task 3

In this essay I am going to Discuss how my feedback back our audience relates to my own view of the strengths and weaknesses of my product and use it to demonstrate hall’s concepts of preferred, negotiated and oppositional readings.
We gathered a variety of feedback for our pop promo video and our ancillary texts, the Digipak and the poster. We collected the feedback from the target audience and from other audience demographics according to the JICTAR model. Further we used quantitative and qualitative data from a focus group, questionnaire and our Youtube/Facebook comments. After this data was then collected we analyzed it.

With our pop video we were hoping to target a specificj audience to buy into our brand image of our artist. We decided that we were targeting men and woman up to university level, this means that they are educated to understand the apocalyptic feel to our video and how it then related to the world around them. Furthermore to how there relationship with our artist was similar to his or her own lives and relationships and how they could relate to him. Due to our artist sexual attractiveness this attracts woman, as they want to watch, buy and consume his music to feel closer to him. However, men also can relate to him as the song is about his heartbreak and how they can relate to him as a man and the troubles in their own relationships. Furthermore our audience may also sympathise or feel sorry for him creating a level of empathy to keep them watching, as he is sad and alone.

However, we were unable to put our video onto the public youtube site, as although we applied for copyright Calexico has a licencing agreement with copyright. This limited our youtube comments and reaction from our audiences

We featured 3 theorists in our questionnaire to help structure the responses we received so that we could anaylise them appropriately. The 3 theorists are Roland Barthes, Kats and blumner and Stewart Hall.
1. Roland Barthes audience expectations and foreknowledge and be able to pick or sample foreknowledge need to reinforce who target audience is
• Who is target audience: age (up to university level), gender, social group
• What other media they consume i.e. what mags they read (look up country western audiences)
• Can go back to institutional context
• Take stills from video or digi pack and ask the question “from looking at this image what type of music do you think he she makes”
• What is your favourite type of music
• Look at the objects in this picture and tell me what you think about it, it what type of genre this represents – what mood (organic, generic)

Kats and Blumner
This is the audience identify with the characters on the screen. Personal Identity, the ability to compare one’s life with the characters and situations within programmes and hence explore personal problems and perspectives. No matter from where or what class any audience member we have can also compare their life to the lives of the characters on screen. We can even identify with the pain and heartache or even confusion as many people go through thee emotions in life.

2) Diversion
Blumler and Katz say that Diversion is the ability to get away or escape mentally from everyday realities. Blumler and Katz say that in order for a media text to be diverting it has to occupy the viewer for more than 70% of the time. Our target audience could defiantly see our video as something they could relate to therefore watching it takes them away from pressures of school, university, home, emotional stress and even the pains of heartache.

3) Personal Relationship
Blumler and Katz say that personal relationship is about the ability to be able to identify themselves with the characters within the media text.
4) Surveillance: Surveillance, a supply of information about “whats going on” in the world.

And stewart hall. Stuart Hall’s is another theorist that can apply to the pop video and its audience. His theory states that a media producer communicated a preferred meaning through a media text.
Audience then has one of three reading, preferred reading, oppositional reading or a negotiated reading. This can be applied to our pop video, we as producers communicated a preferred meaning through our media text (the pop promo video). Our target audience then had one of three of the readings, meaning they accept the message, negotiated meaning they partially accept the message and oppositional, meaning they oppose the meaning and reject it. We saw this same theory apply to our pop video during our focus group. Around 3 out of the 4 members said they accepted the message that they understood it was quite apocalyptic and or understood his unset mood . However, different age groups may see this is different ways.

Through this feedback we wanted to discover whether our target audience enjoyed and understood the message we were trying to put across, the narrative, the representation of the character and if they could identify with them, how our video could be improved and even if they liked the song we had chosen.

These were the questions used which helped us establish these factors

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YFYT56X

The comments we got back was positive such as “I enjoyed the story that progressed through out as he went walked around Battersea, resprenting the journey through life and how it does not always end well i.e with the heart break at the end”
We also got some more general answers such as “good editing” “Great” “very well done”