Introduction


My name is Gabriel Meytanis (candidate number 8560). I completed Brief 1:Music Industry, working in Group 2 with Georgina Harper-Dennett (8720) and Phoebe Hung (8017). Our group photo can be seen on the right of the page. To access my portfolio evidence, please click on the labels to the right named A2 Research and Planning, A2 Construction and A2 Evaluation.


GiGi - Sit Still, Look Pretty (Group 2 Music Video)

Digipak

Digipak
The inside and outside panels of our Digipak
Please click the image above to access our website

Monday 5 September 2016

Evaluation Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our target audience groups, and particularly the feedback which they have given us, have been absolutely paramount during each stage of the project in order to tweak and tailor our finished media products to their needs. I plan to examine and analyse who our target audience is, the feedback which they have given us both via word-of-mouth and from our surveys, and how we have gratified their needs using Blumler & Katz's Uses and Gratifications Theory.

Our Target Audience

I believe that our target audience can essentially be deconstructed into three main groups:

A typical example of a member of
our primary target audience
Primary Audience:
-Teenage girls & young women, 15-24 year-old age range
-Supporters of women's rights/female empowerment/feminism

Our primary audience group is made up of teenagers and young adults, skewed towards females. This age range can be classified as millennials or members of 'Generation Y', born between the mid/early 1990s and early 2000s. Our primary market also have far more progressive attitudes towards feminism and women's rights.

Successful female artists like Meghan Trainor, Demi Lovato, Daya & Selena Gomez
have used their music to make statements promoting feminism & female empowerment

For this reason, we aimed to target a large female cohort by constructing our artist GiGi as a female solo artist who also uses her music to make a clear statement of female empowerment and positivity. These messages can provide inspiration to our target audience groups - especially the girls and young women who make up our primary and secondary target audience.

Audience Consumption Habits

(Please click to enlarge the graphs)

Understanding the media consumption habits of our most important audience segments has been crucial in targeting our audience - especially our primary and secondary groups. According to Ofcom's 2016 report on adult media use and attitudes, 100% of young adults aged 16-24 own a mobile phone, with 93% smartphone ownership. In another study, 60% of 16-24 year-olds' listening habits were through streaming and personal digital music.




Our primary audience is far more likely to stream music than listen via radio or CDs - which have continued to lose popularity amongst the 15-24 year-old demographic. According to a survey for the British Phonographic Industry, young people in the UK are more likely to use free services like Soundcloud & Youtube/Vevo to consume their music, though this is changing with the rise in popularity of subscription streaming services like Apple Music & Spotify.

Secondary Audience:
A typical example of a
member of our secondary
target audience
-Young girls, 8-14 year-old age range
-General pop genre fans/ fans of mainstream chart music

Our secondary audience consists of both younger girls (with an approximate age range of 8-14) and fans of pop & its subgenres such as synthpop & bubblegum pop - which have achieved chart success in recent years. Interestingly, this younger demographic is in fact the most likely to seek out the latest releases (please see below). Alternatively, our use of Dyer's star theory in deliberately constructing GiGi's identity & persona as a role model who remains defiant and staunchly opposed to being objectified could be an aspirational factor, and so could add further appeal to our target markets - our secondary audience in particular.

I have further broken down the appeal of our products to our secondary audience below:
Made with Padlet


Tertiary Audience:
-Older women & relatives of the primary audience (e.g mothers)

A typical example of a member of
our tertiary target audience listening
to music with her daughter.
It is still hugely important to consider older consumers, not just because it simply makes our scope to target our various audience groups as wide as possible, but also because the older demographic is relatively easy to target, as a direct result of younger target audience members consuming our artist's music. Adults are likely to have control over which type of music their children consume based on its genre, content and any messages in the song - so will most likely become aware of our artist in doing so, and will be satisfied that the song doesn't fall foul of any criteria against dark messages or bad language. This audience demographic is also far more likely than the younger primary and secondary audience groups to consume music via the radio.



Using the 'Uses & Gratifications Theory':

A further aspect which we felt was extremely important to bear in mind when targeting our audience groups was to incorporate Blumler and Katz's 'Uses and Gratifications Theory'. This model is essentially based around the belief that audiences actively consume media products, with these media products deliberately chosen to gratify certain 'needs'. Thus we felt it would be very useful to use this theory to help us target our audience, and from there to help convince members of the audience to become fans of GiGi's music, identity & brand, and generate revenue through ticket, music & merchandise sales.

-Information/Surveillance
The idea that audiences actively seek media in order to satisfy their need for knowledge and information on what is happening in the world around them. This has become far easier with the proliferation of information via Web 2.0, allowing easy access to such information. I have listed how we gratified the audience's needs below:

(Please click to enlarge)
Surveillance gratification on the website - how we informed visitors to the site.
-We also included numerous pieces of information on our digipak, such as the artist name, copyright info & track listing. Meanwhile, at the end of the music video, we included "(C) 2016 Glass Ceiling Records" to provide the audience with information about GiGi's record label.


-Diversion
The notion that audiences seek media for entertainment; seeking a 'diversion' in a particular product, to escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday life. In our case, our music video gratified this, following typical conventions of music videos to include content which engages the viewer, such as the artist in performance or dancing, fast-paced discontinuous editing and, often, a captivating narrative. I have listed how we gratified the audience's needs below:


(left) Rapid discontinuous editing        (right) Energetic choreography    

          (left) Parody of the 1950s Housewife     (right) Numerous different setups                 

-The discontinuous editing sustains the viewers' attention due to its rapid cutting speed, and allows the audience to see more content during the course of the video.

-Dancing and performance are also good tools to engage the audience. We ensured that GiGi had a routine, and that viewers' entertainment needs would be satisfied due to her energetic performance.

We took inspiration from Meghan
Trainor in parodying a housewife.
Her music typically promotes
female empowerment.
-The parody of the 1950s housewife was very useful in gratifying the entertainment needs of our primary feminist-orientated audience segment in particular, as it mocks an era in history associated with female domesticity.

-The inclusion of numerous different setups, each with different lighting, costume, props and characterisation, was useful in captivating the audience through the variation in content.

-The balance of the performance setup with the Dolls House narrative also varied the visual content, whilst the addition of slapstick comedy at certain points of the video (please see video below) was a further tool to satisfy the audience's need for diversion & entertainment.



Similarly, this could tie in with Richard Dyer's Utopian Theory, in which audiences pursue media out of boredom or stress, with the utopian, fantasy aspect (as in the Dolls House in our music video) providing entertainment to gratify the audience's needs.


-Personal Relationships
The concept that audiences seek media to gratify their need for inclusion or for a relationship with other people. It also encompasses the idea of interactivity - as theorist Andrew Dubber has stated in "Toward a Sixth Media Age", music websites today are places where people gather and connect with an artist and each other.. We were able to market GiGi as a figure to look up to, and as someone who relates to their audience through her beliefs in positivity and female empowerment. I have listed how we gratified the audience's needs below:


An explanation of the interactive features we included on GiGi's website


-Meanwhile, the friendship which develops between the female doll figure in the narrative and GiGi could be seen as meeting the audience's personal relationship gratification, as the audience can aspire to have a similarly close friendship.


-Identity
The idea that audiences seek media to explore themselves, and to search for traits, identities & personalities depicted in the media which they can relate to. Once again, we were able to meet the audience's gratifications using the music video, deliberately constructing GiGi's persona and star identity to appeal to our audience, and alluding to this throughout the video. I have listed how we gratified the audience's needs below:

        (left) Standing up to the patriarchal doll      (right) GiGi is a sassy, confident character     

-GiGi is presented as a strong, confident and independent woman throughout the video. This enables us to appeal to our various target audience groups, as GiGi is a role model figure who can act as an inspiration for viewers.

-We also present her as someone who can more than stand up to the patriarchal male figure as represented by the male doll in the video. This reinforces the theme of female empowerment within the song, and allows the audience to relate to GiGi through this positive message.


Feedback during the construction process:

Another huge positive of using audience feedback before, during and after the production of our media products was the ability to receive persistent feedback from members of our target audience groups, which allowed us to directly tailor various aspects of our products to their needs and preferences.

General/Group Feedback:

One of the means by which we gathered audience responses was to continually collect audience feedback via focus groups and general comments throughout the construction process of our various products. Looking back, this was very helpful, as we could directly make the changes suggested by our target audience groups and gradually tailor our products to their needs...

-The notes below detail the audience's feedback having reviewed the music video:



(Please click the video above to expand): One of the feedback points which we received was to change the ending of our narrative (please see our final video at the top of the page), as the original version was judged to be extremely awkward.



-The notes below detail the audience's feedback having reviewed the website:



(above): The original version of our website background was adjudged to have been very off-putting to look at, and that it drew attention away from relevant information or images on a page. As a result, we used a couple of promo shots, in a style similar to Carly Rae Jepsen's website.



-The notes below detail the audience's feedback having reviewed the digipak:



(Please click to enlarge the image above) Unfortunately, some feedback which we received during the construction process was contradicted by other opinions expressed on SurveyMonkey during the evaluation. An example of this was the purple track listing on the back cover of the digipak.



Interviews:

A further useful method to collect audience feedback was via one to one interviews. These proved to be incredibly helpful, as we could extract the audience's perspectives on our various media products via a detailed, informative discussion.We were also able to ask targeted questions on certain aspects of our project to discover the audience's thoughts:



Survey Feedback:

Another very helpful method to collect data and feedback from our target audience was through Survey Monkey. Whilst it had its limitations, such as how we were unable to obtain any detailed feedback due to a word count, and were limited to 9 questions unless we upgraded to premium; we were still able to gather very important and useful information to build up a general trend based on the audience's responses

Below I have created a Padlet with each of our surveys - one for each media product that we produced - contained within a video:
(Please scroll down on the Padlet and press play on the videos)
Made with Padlet


I have then analysed our survey results to examine if any trends exist, and to evaluate the overall success of the products which we constructed.
(Please use the arrow keys to navigate & press the square icon to access full screen. To zoom, use the scroller on the mouse.)


It is interesting to note the range of responses which we received. This can link to Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding Model, in which he argues meaning is polysemic, and is open to multiple different interpretations (as seen in our survey responses - especially for the message of the music video). It has also been fascinating to view contradictory responses from audience members on the surveys - for instance when discussing the relationship of the digipak to the music video.

Whilst we certainly succeeded in connoting the genre and target audience of our three particular products, it is interesting to note that the audience often failed to identify similar artists or products, and this may be because we didn't solely base our ideas around one artist in particular, or that we didn't make these influences clear enough. Alternatively, it could be a positive, as GiGi can be seen as possessing a uniqueness whilst remaining conventional (as proven by the clear identification of GiGi as a pop artist by respondents of our surveys).


In Conclusion:

All in all, myself and my group have learned a lot from our audience feedback during the construction and evaluation of the project. It was extremely important, firstly, to establish exactly who our various audience groups were (as well as analysing the possible reach of our product to them, in addition to their music consumption habits) in order to tailor exact aspects of our media products to their needs.

Their feedback during the project was absolutely vital to allow us to pinpoint exactly where we needed to implement changes. Besides this, though, we were also able to analyse their responses during the evaluation stage and assess how well overall we had appealed to our target audience. Whilst we largely succeeded in targeting our primary and alternative audience groups, we perhaps alienated the male segment of the audience due to a large focus on reinforcing the feminist theme with young women.

Overall, though, I am pleased with the comments which we received, and it seems that we were largely successful in convincing members of our audience groups to appreciate GiGi, her brand and what she stands for. I am also glad with what I learned from the audience feedback and I am satisfied that as a group, we used it to the best of our ability to make changes where necessary and to tailor our products to the audience in order to ensure they are as high-quality & successful as possible.

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