Final Production: Evaluation Q7

This is the video I made for the final evaluation question, question 7: looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to your final production?

Final Production: Evaluation Q6

Here is the video I made for Evaluation Question 6, "What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?". 

Final Production: Evaluation Q5 - Part 3

How Did I Appeal To My Audience from GeorginaGilbey

 

Final Production: Evaluation Q5 - Part 2

Audience Feedback of My Final Production 

Feedback from my audience regarding my product:

Questions I will ask:

       1)      From a first glance, what genre of music do you think my magazine represents?

       2)      Which parts of the front cover particularly capture your attention?

       3)      What social group do you think is being represented and how?

       4)      As a member of my target audience, do you feel that this magazine addresses you successfully?

       5)      If you saw this product on the shelves, would you purchase it and why?

       6)      Overall, do you feel that this product represents its genre successfully and/or accurately?

  7) Finally, please leave any suggestions for improvements in the response box below.

I will be asking 4 females and 4 males that I personally know, in the age range of 15-25 as it is my target audience, these questions. To keep their answers anonymous and avoid pressuring them into giving biased answers, I will conduct the survey online through the site surveymonkey.

Analysis of My Results: 

To analyse my results I decided to create a video discussing the responses I gained and what they tell me about my audience's opinion of my final product.

Final Production: Evaluation Q5 - Part 1

Question 5: How did you attract/address your target audience?

Research and Planning

In my research and planning I had three main parts to help me to observe how real productions appealed to their target audiences and how I could incorporate these techniques into my own. These parts were ...

-        Analysis of existing magazines: For this I looked at professional front covers, contents pages and double page spreads of the same genre, which helped me to see common conventions and codes of the rock/metal genre. I looked deeper into the conventions to see how they were utilized to appeal to a target audience, which was usually the young generation from a range of young teenagers to adults in their 20s. From looking at this, I could draw conclusions about how I should target my own audience and what techniques I could use to do so.

      Audience Research: In my audience research stage I found secondary source audience profiling and conducted my own primary research (taking the form of a questionnaire), and lastly, created my own audience profile. This helped me to get an insight into how magazines appeal to people from the audience's point of view rather than purely from analytical assumptions. The secondary audience research gave me information on the readership of magazines of a similar genre to mine, while the primary research taking the form of a questionnaire gave me my own findings to work from. I learned from the primary research exactly what my audience would prefer and this also gave me an idea of the age range of my audience and therefore who exactly I should be targeting it at.
I also made my own audience profile to visually represent my audience. This gave me a more accurate inspiration for my choice in costume for the models on my front cover because I could tailor it to what my audience’s style is.

-        Other Research (regarding the design of my magazine): This included research of mastheads and costumes. In my research of mastheads I found that they are usually very stylized and individual to the magazine, both to give their brand a unique image and to connote the genre to appeal more effectively to their target audience. For instance, Kerrang! magazine’s logo has scratch and crack lines going through it and is in a bold, black font to connote the aggressive nature of the music genre of rock/metal.  

     The research into costumes and lighting helped me to decide what my models should wear in my photo shoot so as to clearly communicate the genre of music to my audience- for example, I knew that accessories like studs and spikes are associated with the goth/emo/metal-lover stereotype, and therefore having my models wear them would give the impression of a magazine based around the rock and metal music genre.

All of this research gave me an overall deeper insight into how exactly magazines appeal to their target audiences, which affected my own ideas because from this I could take examples and incorporate them into my own production. For example, from the masthead research where I found that they are often stylized, I decided to add cracks and scratch lines through my own. This helps to appeal to my audience because it connotes the ‘hardcore’ style of the rock and metal music genre. I also attempted to attract the audience through choosing clothing for my models on the front cover that signified the genre and, how I imagined in my visual representation of my audience, someone with this taste in music would look. For example, I had two of my models wear a checked shirt, which from my costume research I saw was a popular choice in style.  

Final Production: Evaluation Q4

Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Above is a visual representation of the audience for my media product, which shows brands they like and their clothing style as well as bands and music artists they listen to. This is an audience that has a strong interest in the rock and metal genre, and their appearance connotes this interest from the accessories like studs and ear-stretchers to the clothes they buy, to proudly display this love for the music, as the genre is all about individuality. My audience may read similar magazines already such as Kerrang!, Metal Hammer and Classic Rock, and has an age range of 15-25 (although a few Classic Rock readers may be in an older generation). My audience like iconic brands such as Coca Cola, and like to purchase clothing and accessories from shops like Vans, Asylum and Converse. They like to use the social medias Pinterest and Tumblr to interact with others. The bands my audience likes are KoRn, Metallica, Nirvana, Iron Maiden, Foo Fighters and System of a Down.

How did I find this information?

I found this information through the site https://yougov.co.uk/find-solutions/profiles/ , a trusted UK free-to-use site that is a tool for audience segmentation and media planning. You can use it to search for a brand or product, and it will show you an average representation of the audience, along with information such as the brands they enjoy using, occupation, media consumption, digital and mobile behavior and other demographics. I started with searching for readers of Kerrang!, a popular rock/metal music genre magazine, as mine is similar to theirs and so I knew I could use the information to get an accurate idea of my audience's tastes. Below is a screen-shot of a few of the pages I found that show the brands and interests I depicted in my audience collage:

After I found that readers of Kerrang! are also readers of Metal Hammer magazine, I decided to find some demographics for Metal Hammer also, so I could then draw some comparisons and find similarities and differences. Below is a compilation of this information in screen-shots:

The key similarity I found was that both of these audiences have the same age range of 18-24 and the average representation being the male gender, however as previously mentioned I will keep my audience as broad and open as possible to reach more potential readers. Although, it was interesting to see that Metal Hammer and Kerrang! also shared some of the same brands, interests in terms of entertainment and media, and overall values, which gave me enough information to construct an accurate representation for my own audience. I chose to represent this in a visual collage format to make it instantly obvious, to anyone looking at my media product research, the kind of people that purchase and read my magazine.

Final Production: Evaluation Q3

The above Prezi presentation outlines the stages of production a magazine goes through, from research and planning to distribution, along with how my product went through each stage.

Marketing magazines from GeorginaGilbey

Above is a Power-Point presentation that shows the final stage of production: marketing. It outlines how magazines are marketed with examples and also shows how my own product will be advertised.