AS Foundation Portfolio: Paige Armstrong: Evaluation (Not Finished)

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

The above are the sections of my target audience that I researched in order to get a thorough and accurate readership profile for my magazine.

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.