A2 Media Studies Evaluation - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is essential in discovering how successful a media production is as well as gaining information about how to improve the quality of it. The audience's response is the most important part as they are who the video is for the reason it was made in the first place, so their satisfaction is key. Interactivity with the audience is a great way to step back and see how the video looks from a third party perspective. This is not the only advantage, as there are many more:

• Increase knowledge retention
• Improve attentiveness
• Track individual response
• Confirm audience understanding of key points and narratives

The main way in which we gained audience feedback was face-to-face interaction with our target audience, young people aged 17-18 within our school who enjoy the pop music genre our video falls into. Their response was thus: "good use of locations," "loving the saturated effect," and "excellent use of angles, but change the font at the end of the song was quite jarring." We were very pleased with this feedback as it was overwhelmingly positive with very few negative comments to be made. However, the audience feedback still proved to be very helpful in reassuring us that the video we had made was good, but also alerting us to our boring font choice.

Without the audience feedback I would have kept the boring font, however, this exercise has given me and opportunity to take others opinions into consideration, and I agree with what was suggested. As another means of gaining valuable audience feedback I filmed two classmates immediately after they had watched our music video, to gain the instant first opinion. This didn’t give them much time to think about their answer, and so it would be a very basic yet concise answer singling out the main points which stood out for better or worse. 

Another way I gained information about my product was by uploading my Music video up on YouTube, an Internet site where four billion people worldwide, according to 2016 statistics, view videos every day. I then waited a week and checked my YouTube video page discovering that 150 people had viewed my music video. To get more in-depth information I clicked on “insight” on the YouTube page and I found that people tend to loose attention after 1:31 minutes which could suggest there is a necessity for more engaging content or perhaps shorter videos to accommodate shorter attention spans.

I believe that there are many benefits of asking individuals as I received a concise and straight to the point answer. However, the group identified weak points within my music video and offered a solution which was far more advantageous. We chose to film our classmates as this enabled us to conform to our target audience of teenagers. After receiving the feedback, I have learned that our target audience is very pleased with the music video as it adheres to most of the pop stereotypes. Furthermore, I have had much praise about the editing and flow of the music video,” even being acknowledged as “like a real music video.” The feedback which I have studied is very pleasing and promising emphasising that our music video is more than acceptable to be categorised in the pop genre.