UNIT G321 – Target Audience

Part of your research needs to be into a potential target audience for your film – you need to show that you’ve really carefully thought about who would actually pay money to see the film. Think back to the work that we did on Adulthood and Quantum of Solace and the ways in which target audience was a key consideration at every stage of production, distribution and exhibition.

We looked at the various ways in which audiences are categorised:

• Demographic information.
• Psychographic profile.
• Lifestyle.

The first thing to determine is whether a film like yours would be aimed at a broad, mainstream target audience or a smaller (but well defined) niche audience.

Secondly, identify some films that yours would be similar too – probably because they are from the same genre or sub-genre. You can then ask the question – what was the target audience for this film? Your target audience will be fairly similar.

In a similar way, have a look at this presentation – it’s from Pearl and Dean’s website – they sell advertising space in cinemas. It highlights forthcoming releases and identifies the projected target audience from a demographic perspective. It also colour codes the films according to the type of audience that the film will attract. The presentation can be downloaded from this address:

business.pearlanddean.com/filmplanner/

You also need to design a questionnaire that will enable you to confirm the target audience for your own production. Start by asking what information you really need to find out – this will prevent you from asking lots of pointless questions. You will then need to distribute the questionnaire to a reasonably sized sample. Once they have been filled in you need to collate the results and use them to confirm your target audience.

By next Friday (5th March) you need to have presented this information on your blog. Make this as interesting and as visual as possible!

In addition - it's worth having a look on the British Board of Film Classification website as this will provide you with some information on what would be acceptable depending on the likely certificate of your film. Their student website is here:

sbbfc.org

You can download a PDF from here that clearly shows what is and isn't acceptable!

Their main website is here:

www.bbfc.org.uk

Of course you also need to remember that this is an a academic school project!

Over and out...