Media Evaluation Question 3: What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback? Draft

The benefits of using audience feedback in the process of designing your media products is that it allows you to get an outsider perspective on the issue at hand which can be useful as you can be far too close to the product to see any issues.  It also allows you get direct input from your target audience which in this case is males, typically from the teenage years to thirty and usually students (informed from audience research into the punk genre), who are the direct consumers of the products that I'm making.

I collected audience feedback mainly in the use of online surveys, using sites like Survey Monkey and FreeOnlineSurveys.com to collect anonymous feedback, though college based target groups (mainly for the main task and when looking at the audience) and through conversations with my media teacher (more directly related to my ancillary products),

Online surveys deliver anonymous views, hence the feedback is unbiased from a wider cross section of people.   However, the results may not be from your target audience and it time consuming to receive all responses and analyse them.   If the participants do not understand the questions they may not complete all the survey and the results may not be reliable.  However, a problem I encountered is that Survey Monkey is a free site and allows constant free access to results but FreeOnlineSurveys.com requires you to pay to access the results after a ten day period which meant I had to record all the results before the expiry date.

Asking my college focus group to complete surveys gave a quicker response but I could not be sure how accurate or unbiased the resulting feedback was because of the fact that the participants know me and might feel uncomfortable criticizing my work.

Getting responses from media staff is more direct, feedback is instantaneous and didn't require any additional analysis and was more insightful to the project.  However, it can be biased and they are not exactly the target audience.

Learning from the feedback for the project shows the target demographic was more female than expected though this could be more representative of the sample who filled out the questionnaire.  The majority of them prefer to watch videos online on mobiles phones and TV rather than PC/laptops.  A high proportion of respondents watch music videos because they like the song but also how it is represented in visual form and the use of special effects.  Some feedback was contradictory in that there was split between respondents wanting performance or narrative with a small minority focusing on the message.

This feedback influenced the main task as the majority wanted a good narrative to the video which can be summed up with a story arc that matches the song's meaning, so I decided to incorporate this to reach a higher viewership which is why I made the video narrative based.  The feedback also stated they wanted a higher performance level but I was unable to achieve this owing to the initial band dropping out of the project at late stage meaning I had to change the brief to a fully narrative video.

In conducting future audience research I would firstly identify the demographic in greater detail and target them exclusively.  I would also ensure the questions were more focused to the feedback required to avoid contradictory statements and a clearer message.