target audience and how to market to them

Target audience profile

Gender scale

FEMALE ß ----------COMEDY---------- à MALE

Romance        Period        Suspense        Horror        Crime        Action        Sci-Fi

My chosen film genre is comedy which in my opinion is the best possible genre to go for because of the scale above comedy is balanced right in the middle. So we have established that comedy is generally entertaining and watched by a fair and equal amount of male and female audience.

Female ß-----Comedy-----à  Male

Love comedy                   action comedy

If I wanted to scale down my research into my target audience then I would use the chart above showing the two major sub categories in comedy which are Love comedy films which are based more towards the female audience than the male audience. Action comedy is the opposite of love comedy which is based more towards the male audience than the female audience.

I have chosen an action comedy as my film genre so my main target genre audience will be male, however because it’s still a comedy film I’m sure that a very reasonable per cent of the audience will be female.

Age

People of all ages watch comedy films because it’s marketed and made for the masses because it attracts so many different types of people, however different comedy films suit different people. For example Monsters Ink, was aimed at a younger audience than American pie was. American pie was aimed at people over the age of 15 due to its sexual references and language content, whereas Monsters Ink was suitable for all ages, although maybe not appealing to those aged between 18 and 25.

My comedy film will be rated 15 due to the language content involved and violence, so that means I can cross anyone who is under the age of 15 of my target audience list. Because my film is an action comedy I would say that the main age group to be attending my film would be 15- 25 year olds. One of the main reasons that may encourage the 15 year olds would be the excitement and thrill of going to the cinema and watching a 15 for their first time at the cinema, 16-25 year olds will be going purely for the thrill and excitement of enjoying the film. Research I have done online has shown me that 15-25 year olds are the highest attending per cent of audience who view comedy films.

So when it comes to the time when I need to market my film, I will want to market my film mostly at males aged between 15 and 25.

Audience profiling

For starters they will most likely come from England due to the fact that I am marketing my film in the UK and releasing it in the UK. I will be basing my audience profiling on the age category I have chosen to market for which is the ages of “15-25”. Most of this research for this category is done by experience and knowledge.

Families are a very familiar audience at cinemas; comedy is the genre for the whole family to enjoy usually. However one issue with my film is families may not want to go because one of their children may be under the age limit which means none of them will feel inclined to watch the film if one of them has to stay at home.

Going to the cinema plays a very big part in teenagers social lives between the ages of 14-18 usually but in our case 15- 18 year olds. Teenagers love meeting friends in “town” because it’s the “cool thing to do” these days. So they usually go to the cinema to watch films in large groups of 4-10 people to watch films and banter with each other about scenes from the film.

This is why its defiantly important for me to market my film around town centres so that these groups of teenagers see the posters or advertisements and spread the word by mouth or facebook. Which brings me to another point, Social network sites, especially facebook are good ways of spreading the words of films that have just been released it is also a good way for groups of people to send out messages to each other organising a trip into town followed by watching my film in the cinema.