For a film to be successful, the marketing team have to know how to distribute the movie in a way that it is appealing for the general public; further, they also have to take into account the film genre’s targeted audience, which is arguable more important to acknowledge. A target audience are very much necessary to market a film, they need to attract the right people who would not only enjoy the film but also would give positive feedback to enthrall people outside of the niche.There are two types of targeted audiences:
Primary Target Audience – The main audience the film is trying to target. Films are normally established by their demographic according to film’s genre. Includes age, gender, and class.
Secondary Target Audience – Commonly targeted at an audience with a specific interest in the film. Can be a larger group of people than the primary target audience. They don’t have to be identified by demographics.
Typical Horror Audience
Horror films are targeted specifically at individuals between the ages of 15 and 25. People of said ages look for a thrill when they choose to go watch a scary movie, they are often curious on what it has to offer. The horror genre of movies are filled with suspense and scary unexpected pop up scenes, typically named ‘scare jumps’. These thrills are more likely to excite a younger audience. Also, younger audiences are not put off by graphic images as much as an older audience.
There are multiple audience theories made by media analysts to understand how individuals ingest the information transmitted by media texts. Including
1. The Hypodermic Needle Model Audiences receive the information passively via a media text without trying to attempt to challenge or process the data. It was first introduced in the 1920s, which was an age the mass media was still fairly new, cinema and radio were less than twenty years old. The Government discovered the power of advertising to communicate a massage to the public; so the used propaganda to attempt and draw individuals to their way of thinking. The theory suggests that the information gathered from a text passes into the masses consciousness unmediated, the opinion nor intelligence of a person aren’t relevant to the reception of the text. As an audience, we are being manipulated by the creators of the media text. It suggests that our behavior and way of thinking might be easily influenced and changed by media-makers; assuming that audiences are passive. This theory is mostly used to explain why certain groups in society shouldn’t be exposed to some media texts.
2. Two-Step Flow Came about in the 1940s. The theory suggests that information does not flow through people’s minds directly form the text unmediated, but rather it is filtered through “opinion leaders” who then communicate the text to their less active peers, over whom they have influence. The audience gathers information directly from the media texts with the ideas expressed by the opinion leaders.
Uses and Gratifications In 1948, theorists Lasswell claimed that media texts had functions for individuals and society, including the following: surveillance, correlation, entertainment, and cultural transmission. In 1974, researchers Blumer and Kats explained the theory further and published their expanded take on it. It states that people might use and choose a text for the following reasons: Diversion – escape from everyday problems and/or routines Personal Relationships – using media for emotional reasons and other interactions Surveillance – information that can be useful for living, such as weather reports and holiday bargains
Reception Theory Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model of the relationship between audiences and media texts. It states that a text is is encoded by the producer and decodes by the reader. Although there can be two different readings of the same code; by using already existing codes and conventions and drawing the audiences expectations with aspects such as genre, producers can position individuals and create a way of agreement on the meaning of the code; known as preferred reading.
AS Media Studies 