2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?
My finalized product was
originally aimed at a wide age range of 14 – 21 including both genders as a way
of challenging the usual conventions of a pop magazine’s target market.
Although, whilst making my product I found that the conventional target
audience of these magazines are young teenage girls because the stories and
artists that feature are stereo typically what a young girl would rather read.
After careful consideration and feedback from a few different sources, I
decided to change my original plan so that my magazine would become a lot more feminine
and follow the key aspects of a pop magazine. I also found that making my
magazine less gender oriented would make it a lot more difficult to use a
suitable model who would be appealing to both genders, to create engaging
stories which would catch a boys attention as well as girls and make an
appropriate colour scheme which would enable to front cover, contents page and
double page spread to come across more neutral rather than more
feminine/masculine depending on which gender you are aiming at.
In terms of mise-en-scene, I did
not have to consider colour or the type of clothing as much as I’d originally
thought. Firstly, I decided which gender model I would use and thought that
using a female model may take the femininity of the magazine to a certain
extent and become too much – this lead to my male model and the idea of him
being “a teenage heart throb”. I used little to no colour in terms of clothing
and the background of the image so that it would be easier for me to create a
colour scheme without having to avoid any colours of the text clashing with the
colours on the models clothing.
Using a reader profile and a mood
board I had previously made during the research period of this task, I found it
easy to locate different types of stories and images that would appeal to my
target audience. Before creating my own reader profile I thoroughly analysed
other reader profiles made for popular pop magazines. I then took their style
of presenting this and their ideas of which categories were more successful in
this specific market and interpreted this into my own work. After I created
this, I used the information I had collected to try and understand how exactly
the pop genre was carried out and how it helped attract their target audience
so that I could use this to attract a similar audience. In my mood board I have added a selection of
different artists in order to show what my target audience is attracted to and
also other images of existing pop magazines to represent the genre and make
magazines such as Top of the Pops audience’s want to read Wired. I also added
images taken from CD covers which show that my target audience listens to these
tracks, which also leads to the idea of them using technology and reinforces
the idea of digitalization. I then thought it would be a good idea to include
the British and American flag as these countries are the two which pop music
originated from and are the most popular. This lets everyone know that my
largest amount of consumers is in these locations.
In terms of the artists featured on my
magazine I had to consider who and where they would feature very closely as I
felt this was a big component in appealing to my target audience. As a part of
my research for my final product I looked at top pop artists including artists
that are currently in the charts (refer to ‘Pop Songs & Artists in the
Charts’ section on my blog), I then featured these types of artists on my final
products.
When discussing media,
demographics are the statistical characteristics of human populations meaning
any of the following:
- Gender
- Age
- Ethnicity
- Income level
- Education
My readership profile shows that my magazine will be
attracting mostly females, but young teenagers specifically. These teenagers
will be mostly between the ages 14 – 17 and found within the C2 socio-economic
group. Evidently, this target market will be mostly unemployed as it is a
market to work with.
As my target market is a young and unemployed audience I
have made my price a low one of £1.60 so that it is not too expensive for them to buy but not
so cheap that the companies involved in creating it would make little to no
profit. If this magazine was aimed at another type of audience such as men of
the socio-economic group A/B it would have been a higher price because they
will be more willing to pay.
7) Looking back at the Preliminary Task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
