Summary of Product & Audience Research

For our advanced portfolio project, we had to conduct primary and secondary research including analysis of cross media advertising this including; film teaser trailers, poster and magazine front covers, as this is what we will be creating for our project. And researching what sells films to audiences and researching to determine what our target audience should be. This research will help us divide demographic and psycho graphic audiences, this guiding us to determine the most useful parts of these such as; age, gender, attitudes and opinions that will be the best to target.

For my personal research I first analysed movies from a range of different genres such as; romcom, action and thriller. This giving a broader view on the way that film makers advertise their films. For instance, how colour can be adapted to a certain film, in 'Going the Distance' there were a lot of light colours and soft tones giving off an impression of light heartiness and romantic emotions. This I found being a complete contrast to how and what colours were used for the advertisement of 'Devil'. In this trailer and especially the poster, there were a lot of dark colours reflecting the sense of evil or death. I found in the poster, the whole image is black with a just a small portion of the poster, an elevator down button, being red. This symbolising danger or possibly the devil, with the button pointing toward hell? I also noticed with the poster how the unique selling points of a film are a huge focus on the poster, whether it be M. Night Shymalan in 'Devil', 'Resident Evil' in 3D or Drew Barrymore in 'Going the Distance'.

As our group ideas evolved I refined my research and analysis to the thriller genre as this is what we decided to make our film in. For analysis on cross media advertising, I looked at the film 'Buried' starring Ryan Reynolds, another unique selling point. Both the teaser and poster had very successful elements to sell the film and left me wandering what has happened, and has encouraged me to go and see the film. As well as my analysis, we as a group have set up a Yahoo! account and created a questionnaire about the film trailer, asking for the general public to watch it and then discuss what they thought and felt about how it worked etc. Although it can be assumed too general for audience research by having the questionnaire open for all, we did it purposely to see who actually did the questionnaire, this helping us determine a target audience. To coincide with this questionnaire, we created one on Facebook and sent the same questionnaire to selected 'friends' this making the research more refined. As these may not be as successful as we hope, we also constructed a Survey Monkey questionnaire which will give us added data. When collecting results we can then compare and contrast the three to understand who would be more approachable and successful to target in selling our film. We also conducted a more general questionnaire that we handed out to people, this was to useful for us to understand what parts of pyschographic and demographic factors to include in our final piece. To add more to this research we are setting up focus groups and we will record audience’s reactions to teaser trailers of the thriller genre.

To conclude my findings so far, I have understood that unique selling points are very successful; colours are very effective in symbolising elements of the film that you want to reveal. Also, music sound tracks are important and creative however simple they may be, they always add to the atmosphere.

Simplicity is something I have found to be very successful and is something my group and I are considering for our own, as we have learnt that this will be very valuable to the success of our trailer.