Evaluation Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback was vital for the development of our project, but we first had to identify our target audience.

Target Audiences

How we appealed to our audiences

To appeal to R&B fans within 16-24 we used the Uses and Gratifications theory. We looked at what this age group wants from it's media and tried to create our product to service these needs. One of these ways was through social interaction, which for the current generation growing up is more important than ever due to social media. In our video we attempted to emphasise the group shots and the close ups of the singer looking into the camera, increasing the intimacy of the video and giving the viewer the feeling of social interaction and belonging as part of the posse presented in the video, similarly to how Rihanna's music video for 'We Found Love' does this.

Four examples of shots where a group of people are all dancing together to the music. The two pictures on the left also present the viewer as inside the scene, taking part in the video.

We also tried to appeal to all of our audiences needs for diversion and escapism, which is visible throughout the use of fast, bright fireworks in Rihanna's video for 'We Found Love'.

we attempted to provide through the use of bright colours in our studio shots and through fast, non-continuous editing, an example of which is below:

These bright colours and fast jump cuts catch the viewers attention and keeps them engaged, allowing them to forget about reality and lose themselves in the world of the music video for three minutes.
We also used the example set by 'We Found Love' and tried to engage the viewer through the narrative in the song, which gives them something to focus on as the video progresses.

To appeal to the UK Garage fans we made sure that we maintained a garage 'aesthetic', through our use of urban locations and by focusing on the DJ in several shots in the video, which is a trademark of many garage videos, and once again is visible in the video for 'We Found Love', hich features DJ Calvin Harris to try and appeal to dance music fans.

Some shots from the video that show me DJing.

A shot from 'We Found Love' that focuses on Calvin Harris DJing.

In regard to our website and digipak, these were also created to appeal towards primarily an R&B audience. To do this we put the singer of CRUZE on the front cover rather than the DJ, which puts the R&B vocal at the forefront rather than the garage beats. The pale blue and pink colours of the clouds on the background are also much more reminiscent of R&B rather than garage. The inside and back covers focus more on the garage audience, by showing the DJ and the urban location, which fans of garage will associate with the urban landscape of London. 

This is similar with the website which focuses mainly on presenting CRUZE as an R&B/pop act with photos that have clearly been photoshopped onto bright coloured backgrounds. However, the music page very much appeals to the garage audience with it's background being a photograph of CRUZE standing in front of a graffitied wall, signifying the grittier garage influence and the London location.

The music tab of our website 

The image we used for the homepage and news tabs of our website.

How we collected audience feedback

We had three ways of collecting responses to our products: Online surveys, single person interviews and group feedback sessions.

We used online survey service 'Surveymonkey.com' to collect our results, which was useful as our target audience seemed happy that they could access this from their phones, and we promptly collected responses.

How our feedback shaped our production

While editing the video we took group feedback that helped us improve it into something more appealing to our target audience.

We also surveyed and interviewed our audiences about the finished media products. The survey responses to the music video can be seen below:

From this feedback we were able to tell that our target audiences generally enjoyed our video, and largely agreed upon the genre of our song being R&B with garage and pop, which shows that our video did a decent job of signifying genre. We also got some agreement about the personality of the band that we tried to present in the video, as cool and laid-back, with the word 'Chill' coming up several times (Meaning cool and laid-back.). The things that audiences said that they liked about the video seemed to vary, such as the lighting of the studio shots, the location shots and with several people mentioning the siren shots. When it came to criticising the video, our audience generally had the same complaint that the narrative shots didn't fit very well with the rest of our video and that the split screen shot at the end didn't look as professional as the rest of the video.

Digipak feedback

Our audiences response to our digipak are shown below:

The response to the digipak was more mixed than the response to the video, but was still fairly positive overall. Once again audiences were able to accurately identify the digipak as R&B with most people also recognising the presence of the DJ as a signifier of a more dance based genre, such as UK Garage. Similarly to the video, audiences identified CRUZE as cool and laid back from the album artwork, but many also commented on how confident the singer and DJ looked on the front and back covers due to their direct gaze at the viewer. When asked whether they preferred the outside cover or the inside cover (Which consists of one photograph across both panels.), most of our audience said they preferred the inside cover, although both were complemented. It is therefore not surprising that most of the improvements suggested in our survey focused on problems with the outside cover, although most of them were fairly minor.

Website feedback

Audiences responses to the website was generally very positive, with many praising the homepage's design, although one person said it seemed cluttered. The audiences thought that our website looked like it belonged to an R&B act, which was good as this was the primary audience we were trying to appeal to. There was also lots of praise for how easy it was to navigate our website, with every person surveyed agreeing that it was clear and simple. The responses to what the best and worst things about the website were much more varied, with audiences both praising and suggesting improvements for all different pages and features.