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

Audience feedback is a vitally key part in the commercial production of any media text. Without knowing and understanding your target audience in the production of a media text, the commercial viability of your product could become compromised as it may not cater for any current audience. Of course there is the argument that you could be catering for a future audience but financially this is a big risk. As the media texts that my partner Shelley Burgess and I have produced, a music video, Magazine advert and digipak, follow the conventions of professional commercial texts of the same format, it is vital that we follow similar production and reviewing techniques in order to gain understanding of the current industry, not only for future reference but as we are using the works of real life current artists.

We have utilised many methods of audience feedback. Initially we conducted a more intimate form of audience communication pre production of our music video so as to achieve a concentrated form of feedback which we creatively were able to feed off more productively than if we had conducted a wider form of collecting feedback. We carefully selected a group of people representing a variation of target audiences including a young and older audience, and proceeded to ask them to review the music we had chosen. This allowed us to develop our own ideas of what we wanted to include within our media text as well as to explore and develop new ideas suggested by the focus group.

‘we received a lot of positive feedback, with people commenting on both the comfortable pace of the song, confirming it as a good choice, as well as the quality of Charlotte's voice, a real confidence booster for her and she was very grateful for all the compliments.

'It's a little bit boring'  Matthew Perkins

'It is really cute' Sarah Warnock
this point of view was shared by quite a few members of the feedback group.

'very emotional' Hannah Sharples


'The Song seems very nostalgic' Connor Murray
this though was shared by the majority of the focus group which was incredibly positive as it means the inspiration behind the song is being portrayed well. In response to this we asked in what way they would expect this to be represented.

'lonely images, like just a person alone.' Elise Maughan

'Rain clouds and gloomy weather' Connor Murray

'Emptiness' Georgia Wigley

we then asked the group to expand on this and suggest story lines for the music video if they think it should have a story line.

'Maybe you could have the story of a break up' Luke Battle

'You should follow the social exclusion of  a person' Connor Murray

'i don' think it really needs a story line, just a collection of emotional imagery and lip syncing' Harley Mason

this was a view that both me and Shelley both shared, it seemed unnecessary to attempt to create a storyline that wasn't the obvious depressive relationship based event, instead keeping the video simple will give the lyrics of the piece a chance to be taken in and felt and expressed through visual stimuli.’

Post Production we decided to conduct further audience feedback but this time on a lager scale, via using ‘Survey monkey’ (www.surveymonkey.com)allowing us to achieve more diverse data. Survey monkey is a fantastic online service which is incredibly simple to use and to understand. It allows to create, distribute and review a survey and the data collected. From a commercial perspective this is a very valuable resource, as it is a free service and its digital format and distribution financially benefits companies as they do not have to finance the production of physical surveys and their distribution.
After having Completed the production of our music promotion video and uploading it to youtube, we were able to produce a survey using survey monkey which we distributed along with a link to the music video on a variation of online platforms including ‘facebook’ and our media blogs.

the data received was quite positive and allowed us to analyze the success of our media text. 78.6% of the people who took part in our survey ‘liked’ our music video and we received positive comments such as;

‘I liked how the girl was singing along to the song, as it was realistic and I liked the scene shots as they were really nice and gave the video a calming vibe.’

‘I liked the naturual setting and smooth transitions between shots’

‘Liked the way the different shots overlapped and their composition, as well as the scenery, and the colours in the video.’

We also so received some constructive comments, highlighting elemnts of the video that could be inproved.

‘to many faded transitions its quit sickening’

‘Too much going on and too static’

Concern for the lack of movement through the music video was something that is quite a prominent problem and was discussed on many occasions during the editing faze of production, however given the time we had left before the completion date me and Shelley opted to work with the footage we had already acquired. However if given the opportunity, this is something we would change about our video. We also posed this question in our survey. What would people have done differently or change about our music video? We received allot of helpful constructive criticism in these results, highlighting some areas that could be improved, all of which were quite valid.


For example;

‘more straight cuts and more movement in terms of acting’

‘change the guitar that she’s using to an Older looking acoustic one maybe?’

Despite these criticisms, overall the music video receive very positive results, with over half the people surveyed stating that props were used appropriately, and 57.1% of people reviewing the lip syncing as being good whilst the other 42.9% reviewing it as very good. However possibly the greatest indicator of the success of our music video is that no one rated the video below 5 on a scale of 1 10 (with 10 being good) and 71.4% rating it 8 and above.

in addition to our Survey, we also conducted a post production Focus group with the same people we drew feedback from preproduction. by using the same focus group we are able to review how well we have portayed the concepts proposed in the intial focus group. for this focus group we asked the following questions;


1. Did you enjoy our music video?
2. Why did you enjoy it?
3. What was your favorite part?
4. Is there anything you would change?
5. Do you think the music video matched the song?