BLOG TASK 3

Blog Task 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Collect a variety of feedback for your product from members of your target audience and from other audience demographics on your blog via YouTube or other sources. Discuss how this feedback related to your own view of the strengths and weaknesses of your product and use it to demonstrate Hall’s concepts of preferred, negotiated and oppositional readings.

Pre-Information

The JICNARS scale

n A - higher management/ administration/

professional

n B - middle management/ administration/

professional

n C1 - supervisory/ clerical/ junior management

n C2 - skilled manual

n D - semi and unskilled manual

n E - subsistence income/ pensioners/ widows/

casual labour/ unemployed

The Basics of Audience

“Audience Engagement” describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in a different way to the same text. “Audience expectations” are the advance ideas an audience may have about a text. This particularly applies to genre pieces. Don’t forget that producers often play with or deliberately shatter audience expectations. “Audience knowledge/foreknowledge” refers to the definite information (rather than the vague expectations)which an audience brings to a media product. “Audience identification” is the way in which audiences feel themselves connected to a particular media text, in that they feel it directly expresses their attitude or lifestyle (diversion, personal relationships, personal identity). “Audience placement” refers to the range of strategies media producers use to directly target a particular audience and make them fell that the media text is specially “for them”. “Audience research” says measuring an audience is very important to all media institutions. Research is done at all stages of production of a media text, and, once produced, audience will be continually monitored.

How we got our feedback

To get our audience feedback we first of all focused on the different theories and tried to find a variety of questions that would help us find out whether our text was effective or not. These were the questions we came up with (for Roland Barthes):

Which of the following props gave you a clue about what the video was going to be about? How far into the video did you get the genre of the music video and did you expect the time period to change? Could you tell part of the video was set in the 60’s? Looking at the poster, what do you expect the artist/genre/sound/design/video/band to be like (organic/synthetic)?

…for Katz and Blummler:

Do you feel you were addressed by the music video/artist/band and drawn into the video? Do you feel yourself being reflected in the product we created? Do you think there is a fair amount of information that could be useful for living in our media product? Would you put this track on your ipod? …Stuart Hall:

Did you think the video reflected the 60’s style in general (including mise-en-scene, sound, camera, performance etc)? Is there anything you would like to criticize about the video? Were there any thoughts or expectations you had (that were unfulfilled)?

…in general:

What style of music do you listen to? Did this video remind you of anything? Do you think the band is similar to other bands? Do you think the lead singer is attractive? What do you think about the other members of the band? Did the costume design satisfy your expectations of the 60’s? Did you think the change from 60’s to modern was done successfully or would you have wanted it to be any different?

After this brainstorm, we started creating a survey on a website called www.surveymonkey.com. We logged on by creating a user account and started producing questions, sometimes multiple choice, sometimes just yes or no or comment boxes. Because we didn’t want our sample to get confused we only chose about two pages of survey (one page only allows 10 questions) and the questions were as following:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/L6F5DM8

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/L663DB9

(click on the link to get directions to our official survey)

Then we got a sample together which was a focus group of 6 second year students. We used these, because they are the audience we wanted to attract, and also they have a knowledge about music and media and are therefore a good audience to use because they pay attention to all the different elements.

We showed them the digipack covers on my laptop, got them to answer the first questions and then showed them the video and made them complete the rest of the questions. This is how we got our result which we then evaluated according to the theorists.

All in all our audience feedback has shown that the majority of our attracted audience understood our concept and what we wanted to convey with our music video. Furthermore we also noticed that there was still some aberrant reading, however only in little details. Also we found that the element of jouissance was just enough for the audience to like it, and not get confused or disturbed by it.

Feedback on audience foreknowledge and expectations

(Roland Barthes)

Roland Barthes states that everything we do is based around audiences pleasures. We have to make sure we balance expected viewing pleasures with new unexpected viewing pleasures (also known as plaisir vs jouissance), because when we look at a product, we look at the structure of the text and analyse the choice of conventions and ingredients and see what choices are new and which are conventional. Then we can evaluate which ones have worked and which haven’t.

In our pop video we used a lot of expected viewing pleasures such as the direct address of the lead singer, the typical music video shots, the mise-en-scene and performance. However we also used jouissance because we created a 60’s style atmosphere which we then broke into the modern, with Ruby coming in. From our audience feedback in which we tried to find out whether the audience understood her relationship with the band, where she came from and if she symbolizes anything, 75% of our audience got the fact she is from the future, however none understood what her relationship towards the band was.

This shows, that the unexpected element we put into our music video worked for a majority of our audience, however they still remained confused as to what Ruby is actually doing in the video. However, this was an element we didn’t explore that well in our video anyway, and we should’ve probably taken more shots of her to create a pre-story that helps the audience understand her better.

Furthermore Roland Barthes talks about foreknowledge and therefore we asked our sample a variety of questions to test their foreknowledge, for example we showed them the digipack front and back cover before letting them see the video and asked them what they thought the band was trying to convey (either an international/jetsetter lifestyle or a homegrown, local band). 100% said they thought the band would be homegrown which isn’t what we intended, however after seeing the video they got the fact they were more international and jetsetter style. This seems to show that our video conveyed our intentions very well, however the digipack didn’t quite get there. Also we asked the audience to predict certain things about the video after seeing the cover and 60% got the fact it would’ve been something to do with the mix of 60’s and modern, simply from looking at the front and backcover of our digipack. This seems to show that the music video coordinates with our digipack.

Feedback on what the audience got out of the video

(Katz and Blummler)

Katz and Blummler focus on uses and gratifications. It was suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society: surveillance, correlation, entertainment. A text should give escape from everyday problems and routine (diversion), the media should be used for emotional or other interaction (personal relationship), the audience should find themselves reflected in the text and also learning values and behaviours from the texts (personal identity) and the text should conclude information which could be useful for living (surveillance). In our survey we asked our sample about whether they felt addressed personally by the video and a hundred percent agreed. Furthermore we asked whether they had similar fantasies to the girls in the video and again 100% agreed to that. As well as that 85% said they found the video entertaining which shows that we used Katz and Blummlers concept of entertainment in a good way. Also we wanted to find out whether they could engage with the music video and song in any particular way and therefore we asked them whether they would put the song on their ipods (100% said yes) and in which playlist they would put it. The answers were things such as “cooking music funk”, “chill”, “chill out”, “relaxed, chilled”. This was positively surprising because the song is actually about love, however we didn’t focus on that element too much in our music video but tried to convey a message of chilled entertainment and fun (mainly in the montage sequence), therefore the answer is quite satisfying. However maybe we should’ve thought about actually sticking more to the words that about the style of music because this is what we heavily focused on. All the girls we asked also spoke about the fact that they would like to be Ruby or one of the other girls which shows, that we provoked some sort of relevance to love and created a fantasy. Also 90% thought the 60’s idea was great which has surveillance in a historical perspective.

How successful our products were in communicating to our target audience

(Stuart Hall)

Stuart Hall created something called the reception theory. He extended the concept of an active audience even further and conducted a lot of work into how the individual receives and interprets a text and also how their own individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their reading. This work is based on his “encoding/decoding” model of the relationship between the text and the audience. The text is encoded by the producer and decoded by the reader. Therefore there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, through using recognized codes and conventions and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreement on what the code means. This is known as preferred reading. However there is also something known called aberrant reading which are the things that they misread and negotiated reading, but the audience reads but we didn’t actually think of.

To define out audience we asked them what their favourite style of music was, where all of them answered mainstream, and then what they thought our band was most similar to and they all answered “The Beatles”. This shows that our sample has a good foreknowledge and know what they are talking about which makes them reliable. However their own individual circumstances are all quite the same and they are all in group E, therefore you could argue that our sample is biased. However we tried to get to know something about their preferred, aberrant and negotiated reading so we asked them, for example, which aspects of the video signaled to them that it was a 60’s style. As options we gave things such as “the studio camera”, “the white background”, “the costume”, “the simple studio shots”, “black and white”. In this questions the answers varied heavily, because each element was ticked, however no one ticked all of them (which would’ve been great). However some came up with additional information, for example wrote that the microphone was signaling to them the different time period. Also we asked them whether they liked the video or what they didn’t like and all of them said that one of the female actresses looked extremely bored which annoyed them. We acknowledged that fact in the process of editing and tried to use as little shots of her as possible to prevent this reaction, however as we now see it didn’t quite work that well.