Appealing to Our Target Audience

To make our trailer appealing to our target audience, our group has come up with numerous ideas to attract our target market. Our target audience is males, between the ages of 15-24 years old, middle class from a urban area.

The main aspects that our group will be focusing on in order to produce a successful trailer that will appeal to our target audience is:

• Casting
• Music
• Storyline

Casting

Our group has decided to cast a male to be the protagonist of our production, this will make our trailer more appealing towards the target audience as they will be able to relate to the life of the protagonist. In fact, our group has decided to cast majority of the characters in our trailer as males. This is because we wanted a variation of characters in which our target audience can relate to, or even look up to and be inspired. We also chose our protagonist to be black. According to the BFI between 2006-2017 out of 1,172 movies only 157 featured a black protagonist. Our group wanted to have a black protagonist in order to include ethnic minorities into our target audience making it more appealing for them to come and watch this movie.

Music

A limitation of targeting a male audience is that our group is a all female group, thus it will be difficult relating to the life of a male. A solution to this problem is to ask questions to males that fit our target audience in order to understand the life of a male and the situations they would face. An example of this is music. Music is an important feature to a trailer as it dictates the entire mood of the production.  Our group did not really understand what kind of music that males most enjoy therefore we conducted a survey and tally the results out of 30 males between the age of 15-24 years old.

Here are the results:

The results show that hiphop and rap was the music that had the most votes. From our primary audience we have concluded that our music is going to be hip hop based  to appeal our target audience to which will make them moire likely to watch the movie.

This is reinforced by the website https://musicmachinery.com/2014/02/13/age-specific-listening/ who creates demographics of age vs genre of music.

On this website our group found this chart:

Th chart signifies what type of artists individuals are listening to based on their age.  If you look in the category of 18-24 you find that majority of the artists on the list is rappers and hip hop based. This shows that hip-hop/ rap is the most suitable type of music to choose for our trailer.  By putting rap/hip-hop we will be appealing to our target audience as we are relating to them based on what they like.





Story-line 

According to the BFI males are more typically going to watch an action film than females. This shows that they like plots that are dynamic and complex that will keep you to the edge of your seat.
This is reinforced by the survey we gave to 30 boys that are between the ages of 15-24 years old.
Here are the results:

The results clearly show that action is the genre that males like the best. However as our group does not have a big budget we were not able to do an action movie as we were not able to get the equipment to film an successful action trailer.  The typical story line for an action movie is based around the discovery of a problem of some kind and the story leads you to the process of its solution. The story-line is sequential, leading you inexorably by the nose to the satisfying answer. Based on this our group has decided to adapt this foundational convention for a action story line and for  a drama movie. Therefore our protagonist will face a problem in which he needs to resolve, however it will be more realistic and reality based compared to an action film because of the genre and our budget. This will make it more appealing to our target audience as our story-line will have features of an action movie in which they would enjoy, but the story-line will also be relatable to the audience as the story-line may reflect some of the issues that our audience have been through.

According to the BFI 2016 statistical yearbook it shows that individuals between the ages of 15-24 years old also prefer movies with action.

Even though the table depicts that most of the movies are science based/ fantasy these movies still contain a lot of action and features that is found in an action movie. This shows that our group needs to look further into the codes and conventions of an action movie to fully understand what features we can adapt and change in order to fit into our drama trailer, which is at the same time affordable. 

BFI statistical year book also shows that Males prefer more action based films than females:

James Bourne is a successful action move which made 415.5 million USD. However there is a significant male audience share at 73% whilst females are at 27 %.  This evidence supports or primary audience and the idea that we need to include elements of an action gener to appeal to our target audience. 

What Have We Learnt?

Through this research our group has learnt what we need to do in order to create a trailer that is appealing to our target audience. The research has allowed to target key elements of our production such as, music, casting and story-line/plot and really think how we can cater these elements to our male audience in order to create a successful trailer that will be appealing to our target audience. 

We also have learnt that action is the genre that our target audience prefers. Therefore we have research into this genre in order to understand why it is so successful with males between the ages of 15-24 years old. Thus our group will be able to know what features we can add to make our trailer appealing towards our target audience.