Media Main Task Evaluation - Question 4

4) Who would be the target audience for your media product?

My group and I decided that our target audience would be women, and this is because women mainly watch RomComs. Most middle-aged women would watch our film, and some of them bring teenage daughters. Older women also watch these films, sometimes with their husbands, so that shows how big the market is. The benefits of having a genre that is an amalgamation of two are that both comedy fans and romantic film fans will be attracted to your film, and the comedy side of the film may appeal more to men. With the comedy side of the film being more appealing to men, that opens up a whole new audience aswell, and also shows how everyone can enjoy our film. RomComs also attract couples, and people on dates, so this is another audience that our film would appeal to. We decided that for a more detailed target audience, teenagers would be another audience that we would want to watch the film. Teenage girls also enjoy watching RomComs, and we knew this as we are teenagers ourselves, and we enjoy watching these sorts of films. Teenagers are also more likely to watch these because they want to learn more about ‘love’ and being ‘in love’-they tend to be the sort of viewers that buy into the storyline and believe it a lot more. Also, we found out through doing a questionnaire about the opening 2 minutes of our film the majority of the people who watched it believed it should be rated a 15.
When researching the ratings of RomComs, and what age rate our film should be, we discovered that most RomComs are either a 12 or 15-depending on the amount of inappropriate language, nudity and sexual scenes/references in the film. These are the things we needed to consider when assigning the age rate to our film, we had to think about what the rest of our film would be like, because any person at any age could watch the opening 2 minutes. To make it easier to understand how these films would be rated we decided to watch a RomCom that was rated a 15 so we could understand what elements in the film actually made it this rating. We watched Love, Actually and we instantly knew that through the amount of inappropriate language and sexual references and scenes, how it had been rated this age. We knew that after watching this, our RomCom was quite likely to have bad language, and strong sexual references-as ours is more about seduction, as appose to love. We showed in our opening two minutes during the seduction scene that the film was going to be quite suggestive, showing you the start of remotely sexual scenes, but then just leaving the audience to figure out what happened next. With our seduction scene, it was shown as a daydream, and may have been shown for a reason-because this may be followed through with in ‘Bab’s real life. As a result, we decided that our RomCom was within the same ilk as those that are rated a 15; because that is the sort of comedy route we wanted to go down.