Analyse one of your media products in relation to audience

In this essay I will be looking at one of my previously create coursework products in relation to audience. Julian McDougal said that in the online age it is harder to define a certain audience accurately. I will look at 5 theorists in relation to this and look at how these are relevant to my media products. The media product that I’m looking at will be my A2 Music Video for Swedish House Mafia’s song Save The World (Tonight).

Denis McQuail said that an audience could be described as a temporary collective, which is to say that audiences are inter-changing and that the borders between these genres of audiences are becoming more permeable. Our target audience was a mass, mainstream audience, rather than a niche, alternative one and this meant that it was slightly easier to create a product for this kind of audience. However, as McQuail says, our audience now would be completely different in 5 or 10 years time, due to the shifting boundaries that define what a genre is, deciding what the audience would watch. 

McQuail also said that there can be elements of diversion or escapism in the media that we consume and we included this in our video. The storyline that we included was a disillusioned student who wanted to escape the monotonous college life and do something different. If our audience could relate to this then they would also be able to escape from any problems that they may encounter in their lives. This meant that we would be building a relationship with the audience, both speaking to them and listening to them, this links into Hartley’s theory, which I have mentioned below.

Hartley said that institutions have to know their target audience so that they can target them effectively. When we were creating our music video we took this into consideration and made sure that we did enough research to know what we needed to do. We did this by doing vox pops and this meant that we were able to ask our audience questions like ‘What do you expect from a dance music video’ and this meant that we were able to plan things into the video that people would expect and enjoy. By doing this we were able to ensure that the products that we were creating was suitable for the demographic that we wanted to aim it at. By putting things like fast paced editing and surrealism, which were some of the things that the people who we did vox pops on recommended.

Stanley Cohen says that media can create moral panics, which is a mass response to a group, person or attitude that threatens to disturb society’s norms. You can see this in many music videos, such as iLL Manors by Plan B, who shows young hooligans in his music video, beating people up, videoing assaults and intimidating the elderly. This would make the general public think that all young people who live on the council estates are like this and would be afraid to go there. This could be amplified by masses and could then be like a hegemonic control, telling people what to think and not letting them think for themselves, which is common in the media e.g. newspapers, websites.

Stuart Hall said that there are 3 ways that you can interpret a media text, preferred reading, negotiated reading and oppositional reading. This means that when an audience is consuming these media products they are able to either get the opinion of the artists or make up their own minds, or a bit of both. Our video was open to all 3 of these meanings, as we had an idea of the message that we wanted to get across, but also saw that there was a way that other people may interpret it. The message that we had was that even though someone is seemingly unimportant in one aspect of life, they can be heroes in another part e.g. when he is saving the different people as the video progresses. This would be our preferred reading, but the audience that we had could interpret it in a different way.