Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

As well as learning what our audience thought of our music video and ancillary texts from our audience feedback, we also learnt that our music video has a wider appeal that we initially thought.

Before our audience feedback, we had certain expectations about our audience. Here are some profiles that we created in the initial stages of the project.




Secondary Audience Profile

• Gender: Female
• Age: 8 - 15
• Occupation: Student
• Class: Middle class
• Interests: Music, film, TV

Why?

• They would appreciate the fairytale feel of it
• Ava would be an aspirational figure for them
• They would enjoy the aesthetics - the cute props and dance routines
• They would like the themes of romance and comedy

Tertiary Audience Profile

• Gender: Female
• Age: 30s/40s
• Occupation: perhaps something creative
• Class: Middle class
• Interests: Various cultural activities, such as music, fashion, film, photography and literature

Why?

• The childlike feel of our video would promote feelings of nostalgia
• They would be able to relate to the situation (the break-up/make-up idea)
• They would appreciate the one-shot aspect

After the completion of our three texts, we hosted a screening where we handed our questionnaires. We then interviewed a focus group of our target audience using our questionnaire questions. We copied these questions onto our survey on SurveyMonkey, which our group shared on our personal social media sites. We drew on some aspects of the Uses and Gratifications theory when constructing our questionnaires for our audience feedback. With the relationships element, for example, we asked whether the audience could relate to Ava, and with the identity aspect, we asked our audiences if they thought Ava is an aspirational figure. The entertain element of the theory was particularly important as the primary function of a music video is to entertain, and so we asked what the audience liked and disliked about our video and so on.

Here is a video of a us interviewing our focus group:





After receiving feedback from our target audience, Sharlene conducted an interview with her sister, who is in our secondary audience:



This Padlet shows some of our survey and questionnaire responses.

Created with Padlet

In Summary:

What people liked
Music Video

• The one-shot element
• The set and props
• The set changes and quick changes between costumes
• Ava's personality - she is very relatable and aspirational, quite quirky but also down-to-earth
• The fun and cheerful feel of the music video
• The use of the frame iconography and the meanings associated with it

Album Art

• The panels work really well together - a constant theme across the digipak
• Many people liked Ava's funny faces that she was pulling in some of the shots as they thought it helped establish her down-to-earth nature
• The handwriting font used for the track-list and the font of the Ava logo

Website 

• The site is visually attractive (many liked the colour scheme and the wallpaper background)
• It is very easy to navigate
• It is interactive and immersive in that there are a lot of things going on - for example, the countdown and newsletter on the Home page, and the Ava Needs You competition on the News page

What people disliked

Music Video

• The dance moves were quite cheesy and the set hands looked a little awkward at times
• The lack of male set hands made the video seem matriarchal - negative representations of men
• A few people thought the boat prop didn't look very professional
• Some believed the set changes could have been smoother, and others thought the whole thing seemed a little rushed
• The lyrics contradicted what was happening in the shot which confused some people

Album Art

• Ava's expression in the photo on the back cover seems quite serious and therefore looks out of place with the other shots where she is often smiling or pulling funny faces
• The digipak is perhaps too pink - it looks very girly
• Some thought that the album wouldn't stand out in a shop or on iTunes because of the pastel colours and the fact that it's quite conventional

Website

• Some of the pages seemed a little impersonal - saying "Ava loves hearing from you" rather than "I love hearing from you"
• Introducing an 'About' page would have also made the site more personal as it would allow the audience to see where Ava came from and how she ended up being an Indie-pop artist
• There should be size options on the clothing in the shop

Interestingly, we discovered that we received quite positive responses from the young male audience. Many of them appreciated the one-shot and liked the general fun feel of the music video. A lot of them also thought that the video was quite matriarchal, however, and would have been better with more male set hands. Having said this, we were rather surprised with the positive male feedback, and realised that the themes of comedy and the light-hearted feel of the music video allowed it to have a more universal appeal. Perhaps, then, we could conclude that our secondary audience is 16 to 24 year old men.

In analysing our YouTube statistics, we were able to see who was watching our music video and how they were watching it. The 9 likes suggests that our video is appealing and entertaining, and it was also interesting to see how a few of our viewers were in Serbia, Bulgaria, the US and Spain.

Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding Model