Evaluation Question 3

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?


 During the time creating our music video and campaign we have involved and immersed our audience in everyway we thought we could. By using this audience feedback we have defined our target and further secondary audiences. This was good to hear their opinions and ideas on what to add or change within any of the stages of our package.

Audience Research: 


We had a clear idea of who we thought was Lady Gaga's primary audience.  Therefore we placed this as being: 

•  Predominately female/gay male audience between the ages of 15 - 24

But we also took into consideration other secondary audiences that may still enjoy Lady Gaga, these were: 

• Male/female - any sexuality
• Tween audience (8-12) 
• Older audience of 25 - 44 

However before setting anything in concrete we wanted to make sure that this was the case, so we created a small video to gather audience research. This video would be interactive where the person being quizzed would be shown a series of audio and visual content with questions appearing in which we would ask them to voice their response and record them whilst doing this.





We first went to a year 11 class, this was quite surprising as it was hetrosexual males that were most active during the video, and willing to identify themselves. However some stated that they disliked her and/or her music. Most of the people in question were willing to watch her music videos but not willing to listen to the actual music or follow her on social media sites. However what we can do with this evidence is link this to Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze Theory - in which she argues women are placed on screen for the pleasure and gratitude of men and are objectified as a consequence of this. This could be argued as we showed them a short clip of Poker Face in which Lady gaga can be seen not wearing a lot of clothing.  





 When we went to see a year 12 class,we noted that all the females stood up when they thought they knew the Lady Gaga track. - They correctly indentified all of Lady Gagas videos. Which in turn secured the fact that this would be our target audience. There was one male who stood up for the question - 'Have you listened to any of her songs in the past week'. This reinforced that this particular male would form part of the secondary audience. We asked him if he owned any of her songs, although the answer was no he said that he had seen it on YouTube and decided to listen. This having an effect on theory Web 2.0 as before YouTube it would have been impossible to hear tracks regularly without having to pay for them. Although he is unlikely to share it with his friends on facebook it doesn't mean he wouldn't, at least now he has the option. What this suggests is that her enjoys her music videos probably due to the style as they are quite risky without being obvious, but also include intelectual references that not many people would get - for example; in Bad Romance the reference to Hitchcock with Pyscho, Vertigo





 We asked 2 girls and 1 boy who were in the lower bracket of our primary audience as they were aged between 16-17. When they were asked to identify the songs, the girls instantly knew the songs (one girl in particular) - this then became much clearer as we went further and she described herself as a fan. - This was because she was able to name all her albums off the top of her head! With no help or assistance! This was very reassuring for us as it showed the clear fans of Lady Gaga were within our 15 - 24 age bracket. In the video it was clear to see the male did not really know the answers and did not descibe himself as a fan. Although he did not show dislike unlike some of the year 11s, however towards the end of the video he admitted to seeing a Lady Gaga tribute band known as 'Maybe Gaga'. This showed us that the secondary audience incorporating males was a wise idea.





 We were able to show a few teachers our video, to see if she does infact have an older secondary target audience. Both of the first teachers identified Lady Gaga, both identified the first video and showed some recognition to the second track, with one able to identify the name of the collaborating artist. However the third track caused issues this is maybe due to the fact that the this song was not widely distributed. However we are lead to believe this is also due to the fact these people are not in Lady Gagas target audience. Despite this both showed familiarity to Tony Bennett, so it could be possible that Lady Gaga is using this to her advantage to help widen her current target audience by collaborating with him. They classed themselves not as fans but appriciated her music. This put us in a dilemma, as the teachers seemed like they would targetable by Lady Gaga but were not her ideal secondary audience.

 



 To confirm some questions for our own benefit we asekd a second set of teachers. On our first image they recognised Lady Gaga from her controversial 'Meat Dress' in which she used as a public display to say that women should not be used as meat in the industry, slightly controversial and certainly stirred up a lot of fuss, one thing we did come across though was the intertextual references to the dress as seen here in a previous post. One teacher (male) was able to recall a section of the telephone video, which once again demonstrated to us that a hetrosexual male is a clear audience for Lady Gaga to target, affirming to us that it would be foolish not to rule them out. He said he was able to identify this as a consequence of his 9 and 11 year old children, this then confirmed that we also needed target a Tween audience.


  


To clarify our thoughts one last time we asked a group of girls from year 13 they gave us a few extra pointers as well as being able to identify 'Marry The Night' which no one else was. However what they did mention is that Lady Gaga is aimed at 12 year olds which is interesting because that is on our Tween audience. When challenged and i asked them 'Don't you think Lady Gaga videos are a bit explicit for 12 year olds and therefore aimed at an older audience?' They replied no, its what all music videos are like. Which is interesting and could possibly mean that we could play around being a little edgy. 





Thanks to this audience research, we are confident that our audience was what we expected, and so started with the production of our music video and campaign.


Audience Feedback

We used Viewsync as much as possible during our collection of audience feedback as we wanted the best possible viewing experience for the viewer. 

 An example of it being used is the clip below:





 We gathered some audience feedback on the use of flashing during the cat walk scene in which 'Lady Gaga' is wearing a paper dress and red heels. We had 2 versions of the clip which we exported in order to gather peoples thoughts on which they preferred most. The girls feedback was very useful to us and very detailed so as a consequence we decided not to waste any more time working on that particular section anymore. 


We started to recognise that more feedback is better so we continued, this time we asked multiple people about the Andy Warhol inspired section, we had just completed it and wanted to see peoples opinions on it. This was the following feedback: 




This was very valuable audience feedback as people were lead to believe that the person was actually stood in the room, and although a repeat of itself - many times, they liked the fact they were all stood so close together and provided a good depth in the room to make it seem more realistic.




This could have been more detailed but it seemed like they preferred the more colourful one of the videos.



Next we asked about Magazine Ads:  

This first clip was useful as it was talking about the Andy Warhol poster and how the viewer noticed the links between the magazine ad and the same image being used in the Andy Warhol section of the video. She thought that it was good as it was cohesive and easy to understand. She liked the colouring used and also scanned the QR code to make sure it worked!






We paid close attention to what people thought of our products, many were largely positive about our products and each piece of evidence gathered was considered. An example of this is when we showed a collection of Year 12s our music video we gathered the feedback below:

Audience feedback sheets that we collected.

This feedback was useful, but it took time to get through it to get a sense of what people thought. Also some people were not very clear, or we wish they had expanded their answers. Therefore we thought it was better going to get video feedback. When going round the class, we spoke to one of the AS Media students, who we thought would be able to give us a detailed and more complex answer than those who didn't study it. This is what she said:

Her comments were helpful for us, but she stated that she felt that the two Gagas at the end were a bit odd in terms of size. We opted to ignore this feedback, as the look we wanted for this section was to seem like Gaga was observing herself and her performance. We thought she analysed appropriately our target audience that was near enough perfect, this therefore showing that we have targeted our audience effectively and appropriately.


Therefore we set out to gather some more audience feedback especially more on magazine ads.

We gathered some more from a teen audience who gave us some constructive feedback on things we needed to do/ try out. They also scanned the QR code on one of the magazines to confirm that it worked. 





We also asked another teen audience what they thought of one of the teasers that had no images present in order to lure them in to scan they QR code. Which worked! As they did!





We also asked our secondary female audience what they thought of our products their answer is below: 





We also gathered a small amount of audience feedback from our Tween audience (8-12) which the looked just at the magazine ads and decided which they thought looked nice and the best one for their age range. 





We also used new media technology, such as Facebook and Instagram to gather audience feedback. This was very useful as it allowed us to contact and ask people we might not have been able to ask without this. We used Instagram as our main source as we targeted specfic lady gaga fans and asked them to comment. First however we collected some simple audience feedback: 

 This confirmed what we thought about the target audience of Lady Gaga fans further. Many were very willing to help out and we even acquired a few friends along the way!

However what also can be noted is the spam comment at the bottom this caused some limitations but it was well outweighed by the amount of useful comments we got.

We gathered a variety of audience feedback on a variety of images and magazine ads but one for us stood out the most and this was the Andy Warhol image, this is because it was post-modernism Pop Art connotations which Lady Gaga referenced in her 'ArtPop' album. One said she would like to see it without the wig, however this is something we are not able due to not being 'Lady Gaga' and needing to keep an amount of verisimilitude. Another commented on how Gaga they looked, and felt it seemed to fit with the ArtPop theme. We were overwhelmed by this comment as we had not realised the ArtPop connection, only our Pop Art connection. However once it was revealed to us we immediately knew how we could use this and adjusted the images to better suit the clear lines shown in Lady Gaga's ArtPop, we did this by switching the yellow and orange Gagas around. Which in turn improved the advert as a whole.  

The best comment we could have ever recieved.

We also collected a wide range of audience from Facebook, this was useful as I have a wide range of different friends from different backgrounds as well as different age ranges that not only cover our primary female audience 15 - 24 but also our secondary audiences 

The feedback we received was useful however because they are my friends we didn't get constructive criticism, this is why personally i preferred the Instagram as the comments were from true Lady Gaga fans as well as being anonymous. 

In Conclusion: 


I think that our audience feedback has a wide variety of different responses from a wide range of different people. On reflection i think I personally would have preferred slightly more audience feedback from Instagram with the video - however we found videos on Instagram did not perform as well as pictures. Especially when there was no real Lady Gaga involved. I think i would have also preferred some more audience feedback from our secondary target audience through video, however we got a reasonable response through Facebook although Facebook was one of the weaker platforms used. As can be  seen here in our links list to other posts which had weaker audience feedback.