Evaluation Task 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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I created a prezi to clearly demonstrate the journey of my process, before and after receiving audience feedback. 




What have I learned from my audience feedback?
We used quantitative and qualitative research as a method in receiving audience feedback. We created open and closed question surveys including questions such as "Would you say we have photoshopped it too much?" where our focus group would either put yes or no, this is a closed question. 
Using open questions are useful as they are quick and easy for our focus group to understand. This gathers much more data and allows us to ask more questions in a small amount of time. Closed questions were also very useful in gathering richer data. I felt that this was more useful in finding out what to improve on for our products as the data was more constructive and rich in detail. We placed this data in pie charts and graphs to easily see the majority view in answers. This helped us to really establish what our focus group thought and notice any patterns in data.
The demographic and psychographic profile of our audience was males and females of age 16-19. They are all college students of similar backgrounds and interests. This meant that feedback were very similar as it was only coming from one aspect of our target audience. We therefore do not know whether our improvements based off our limited audience feedback is preferred by our target audience of all different kinds of backgrounds. 



We felt that some responses and feedback might not be honest and therefore not accurate. As we conducted open focus groups we realised that some people might experience conformity as they are amongst their peers and not giving their own personal opinion. This is a limitation as we effectively only receive one piece of feedback, rather than multiple. On the other hand, one advantage of using these focus groups is that we received the feedback with lots of detail. Our audience were able to develop their explanations so that we completely understood what they meant, so that we could go and improve our campaign with a straightforward vision of what we should improve upon and achieve.  

From our feedback, we discovered that our music video is clear in that it fits into the genre of R&B. The conventions of R&B that we encoded, such as the colourful backgrounds and revealing costumes are coming through to the audience clearly. We also had audience comment on how engaging our video was, claiming that 'the music video held my attention the whole way through'. From this we realised that the quick cut editing between shots was keeping our target audience engaged thus seeing our artist to have a fun and preppy star image. However, we felt that we needed to add more shots of the rapper and dancers as we received feedback claiming that it is 'too repetitive'. Therefore we improved by adding snippets of shots other than Nand.C, but using the same style of quick cut editing.
Audience feedback lead us to look at the encoding/decoding model, proposed by Stuart Hall. This theory is a way of understanding multiple readings of media texts. To encode a text is to attempt to deliver an intended meaning to the audience. However, depending on social and cultural contexts, audience will decode the meanings differently. For example, we wanted to encode a meaning of Nand.C feeling a connection to her audience by making her sing directly into the camera. We found from feedback that our audience decoded this correctly in feeling like she is talking directly to them. 
  

We turned to the uses and gratifications theory proposed by Lazarfeld, Blumler and Katz. This theory suggests that audiences actively look for and select texts that they wish to consume to fulfil specific needs and desires within their lives. In terms of our focus group, they found our video very entertaining and wanted to see more of the dancers and rapper to get a bigger overall sense of our video.  For some of our target audience, our music video acts as a route to escape mundane reality. For others, particularly the female aspect of our music video, our music video acts as a personal identity, in which females identify and admire our artist's feminism and female empowerment. 

Based off our audience feedback of conducting focus groups and questionnaires, we found that our audience go for preferred meaning. Our target audience we focused on was 18-24 westernised males and females; who accepted our intended meanings of creating our artist's star image to be sexy and mysterious but also fun and confident. However, as we only focused on a select few from the same social context, we did not consider other cultures into account. Individuals from a different cultural contexts may lean more towards the negotiate or oppositional reading, as they decode our encoding differently depending on their specific cultural context. We found that some women opposed our intended meanings of creating a sex appeal, as they may see her as being objectified. 
In conclusion, we received feedback from our target audience of females and males 18-21 via focus groups. One limitation we had was that our focus groups were devised of our target audience from the same background, limiting a diverse range of feedback we received. From this feedback we learnt what we were doing well, such as our quick cut editing style, and what we should improve on e.g. adding in more shots of the dancers. Through the use of theoriests such as Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding model and Lazarfeld, Blumler and Katz's Uses and Gratifications theories, we identified what our target audience looks for in our video. This helped us to improve our campaign to suit those audience needs.

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