BLOG TASK 3 - What I learnt from my audience feedback.

Audience can be seen as the group of people who consume, or might consume a media text (Price). In order to successfully appraise audience feedback we took data from an accumulation of sources, finalising with a focus group: a procedure commonly used in the industry. I constructed several open questions, designed and initiated to raise discussion while my partner took notes. Other areas included Youtube, friends and family.

The pop video is primarily aimed at young men and women aged 15 – 25. According to theorist Jictar, different media texts are always aimed at certain audience demographics within a spectrum – a spectrum existing as a divider between social classes; labelled from ‘A’ to E. ‘A’ being the highest in terms of economical contingency and E being the lowest. The pop video targets the whole spectrum due to the creatively versatile nature of its existing genre. “Rock and Roll has always attracted the masses.” – Roger Taylor.



A focus group differs from a questionnaire for many reasons; primarily it’s because a focus group instigates conversation and therefore subtracts as much fresh information as possible from the selected audience. Within the exercise we wanted to address 3 fundamental questions: did they enjoy it, did they understand the message, and how they thought it could be improved. The actual list of questions used was as:

Did you like the choice of song? Like that kind of music etc...

How do you think the band was represented?

What qualities (in terms of the band members as individuals) came through the most?

Did you locate any kind of message within the images and the narrative?

If you could compare their image, style and song choice to any band - who would it be?

Were there any blatant inspirations in terms of their image and style that you picked up on?

Do they seem like the kind of band you would be interested in? I.e. purchase cd, see in concert etc...

Through these, we hoped to address the fundamental questions and draw out as many vivacious quotes as possible. Once we had finished the exercise, we realised it was a small scale trial of the pop video and ancillary products.



Youtube proved a necessary tool in terms of exhibiting the video, but generate a mass of feedback on the web page – it did not. As of now we have received one comment which was ‘love it’ from a seemingly faceless viewer. Encouraging as the comment is; one comment is not enough to base anything on so we move forwards – to friends and family.



We attempted to use Blumler and Katz’s theory titled ‘Uses and Gratifications’ when assessing our audience response. The theory argues that audiences use and gain pleasure from media texts by looking for four things – personal identity, surveillance, diversion and personal relationships – in any media text they receive and consume. Two examples can illustrate this; firstly, the audience will identify with a group of young men of their own age and inclinations, who are living on the edge, finding comfort through their brotherhood, enjoying alcohol, drugs, music and implied sex. Close-ups of the band filmed documentary style stress how normal and down to earth they are – a notion that also conforms to Richard Dyers theory on stardom. Of our focus group of 14, 11, (7 male, 4 female) identified with that image. Niall, a down to earth 17 year old from Kilburn, said, “Living the dream, who would not want to be a pop star.” We posted the video on Facebook and received 491 views within 6 weeks and of 11 comments, 7 were favourable. James from Manchester said, “Great video.” All of our focus group agreed that the pop video was highly entertaining. Blumler and Katz say that a media text has to occupy the viewer for 70% of the video in order to be riveting. The 7 girls agreed that they lacked powers of concentration to last for 70% but that it was still diverting and acted as a form of escapism. The males were occupied for 100% of the pop video - Stats that enforce a notion stating that perhaps the video was more suited to males, even though we tried to attract both sexes. Hannah, an astute 16 year old from Surrey, said – “The band was brilliant. Quite sexy as well!”



Stuart Hall’s theory states that producers encode a preferred message which the audience decodes in one of three ways – where the audience accept the preferred meaning and message, rejects it by being oppositional, or negotiates their own interpretation. My pop video has two preferred meanings; that the band is a movement celebrating their own unashamed youth, freedom and bohemianism, and that life is a party. The latter is conveyed by the psychedelic nature of the lighting in the performance aspect along with short cutaways to the band partying, drunk out of their minds, with young beautiful women. The first is signified more through the editing because the video cuts to beat, subsuming rhythm with the image, demonstrating their energy and youthfulness. A most interesting ‘negotiated meaning’ was the views of a quirky and individual 17 year old from Hull who stated “while I do see that they’re creative, they also appear to be pretentious and platitudinous”.



In conclusion, the majority of our audience feedback was positive and highly encouraging. Friends and family (on the whole) understood the message but what delighted me the most was that everyone seemed to take something different from it also. Whether it be their own negotiated meaning or something positive we had not intended to portray at all. If their was one thing I could do differently, given a second chance; I would not randomly select students for the focus group like we did and instead select students who are reputed for loving music. This would have given us a bigger insight into how the niche audience would react to the video, instead of wasting our time with people who don’t like anything!