Cover Analysis

Grazia is a fashion magazine that attracts woman from the ages of 25 – 45 and its aim is to bring fashions most fabulous things to the readers every week. The reason for the choice of the target audience that I have chosen is because in the magazine they have celebrity life and fashion styles that appear in it so I believe that elder woman would be more interested into reading these stories. Grazia every week sells more in the UK than Vogue that is another fashion magazine. Grazia is also known for gossip about celebrity’s lives, other information that relates to women’s lifestyles and beauty tips. Grazia continues to have the highest loyalty of any other weekly lifestyle monthly. The different elements that appear on all magazines are cover-stars that are celebrities or non-celebrities, a masthead that is the title of the magazine, cover lines that sum up what you will be reading in the magazine and banners that are summing up the magazine.

Analyzing a Double-page Spread from Grazia Magazine

The double page spread that I am analyzing is about a woman that is able to relate to the abduction of the McCann’s child Madeline. In the article the woman tells a story of how her son had be abducted outside the supermarket when he was a baby and 15 years later she was reunited with him, in the article she mentions that she believed in hope that she would eventually find her son which she did, she leaves a message to the McCann family saying that to never give up on the search of their child as she believes they will find her. This would interest the target audience of the magazine of who have also been through the same situation of their child being abducted or who are feeling their pain and emotions so they are able to relate to the emotion and situations of how they feel and are handling it.

The layout of the double page spread has more images used than text. There is a headline which sums up of how the woman telling the story relates to the McCann’s situation, captions have been used to describe who the characters are in the images, a pull quote ‘My stomach flipped. ‘Where’s my baby?’ I gasped. ‘Where is the pram I left here?”’ has also been use which shows a piece of the story has been took out to attract the audience of who may read this magazine. Also in the double page spread there has been a kicker used which gives a brief explanation of what the story is going to be about and who is telling he story.

The mode of address of the article is informal as it is giving you information about the situation that has happened, the article about the abductions is a serious and important story that has happened it gives out factual language as it gives you specific dates of when the abduction happened and is very detailed about everything from when it happened to when they found the mothers son. During the article, when you read it, it sounds as though the woman that is being interviewed for the article is telling you in person, as it doesn’t make out to sound as though it is a story that has been made up.

There are three different images on the double page spread article, there is one of the woman who is telling the story which she is stood on her own and is a black and white picture, this picture shows the emotion of how this woman was feeling during the abduction of her son when he was a baby, the second image is of Kate McCann she is the woman who relates to the story as she had her daughter abducted from their holiday hotel, in the image Kate McCann looks as though she is in pain with her holding a pink teddy which could be her daughters. The last image on the double page spread is of the woman again who is telling the story but in this image she is now with her son, the son that had got abducted when he was a baby, in this image shows happiness and gives out hope that to never give up looking because it could always result into something happy in the end.

LO1: Understand How Media Producers Define Audiences For Their Products

In this unit we will be learning how producers create products for a specific audiences. We will learn this by researching different ways; the different ways to research are primary and secondary.

In primary research you would look at the quantitative and qualitative, examples of quantitative would be looking at the statistics and numbers of audience that are interested in the product, this could be looked at by questionnaires of what people are interested into be able to get what they are looking for and qualitative research would be looking at more detailed data such as focus groups (interviews), where in this more personal questions can be asked for them to be able to get better information.

For the secondary research you would be looking at what has already been done, such as audience reviews this would be found on box office’s that could be based on Internet sites such as ‘IMDB’, ‘BARB’, ‘RAJAR’ and ‘ABC’. On these sites you would be able to find more information that would be needed for you to be able to get better idea of what the audience think of certain products.

Unit 6: Critical Approaches to Creative Media Products

LO1: Understand how media producers define audiences for their products

To discover how producers define audiences for their products we are going to use 3 research and classification methods. We will apply the methods to 2 contrasting films and then compare the results:

Defining media audiences:

Quantitative Audience Research

According to the UK Film Council the 15-24 age group visit the cinema more than any other age group, with 40% of 15-24 year olds going to see a film at least once per month.

Table 14.4 Frequency of cinema visits by age group, 2009

	Age 7–14 %	Age 15–24 %	Age 25–34 %	Age 35–44 %	Age 45–54 %	Age 55+ %	Overall %
Go to the cinema at least once per year (proportion of population 7+)	88	81	67	66	58	35	60
Go to the cinema at least once a month (proportion of population 7+)	32	40	21	15	11	6	18

Therefore, does it come as a surprise that in 2009 “More films were released with a ‘15’ classification than any other category (44% of all releases) though ‘12A’ films took the largest share of the box office (42% of total box office).”?

Task 1: Secondary Research - Statistical Data

Describe the nature of primary and secondary research using examples.

Explain, using examples the range of sources that are available for media specific research on audience.

Task 2: Primary Research - Focus Group

Watch the following links and then conduct a focus group to discuss the types of audience that each film would attract:

Insidious - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1YbOMDI59k

Insidious - Audience Profile
Age range	15 - 24
Gender %	60% male and 40% female
Demographic	B to E
Ethnicity	Ethnic background: White American/British. This is based on the cast who are in the trailer. The stars in the film are most likely to attract the particular ethnic background in order to make the film relate to certain ethnicities.
Psychographics (values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles)	Liberal, social lifestyle, couples
Geodemographics (where they live)	All around USA and UK mostly
Why would the film appeal to this particular type of audience?	Interested in the producers pervious films, fan of the genre (horror). Believe that the audience of who have an interest in the producers previous work would go to watch this movie to see what new horror genre he has created, audiences of who are fans of the stars would also be interested in the film.

Lovefield - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4meeZifCVro

Lovefield - Audience Profile
Age range	18 – 40
Gender %	50/50%
Demographic	C – E
Ethnicity	European: French Canadian Italian
Psychographics (values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles)	Amateur film makers Liberal (laid back and open minded attitude) Media and film studies students
Geodemographics (where they live)	North America (Canada) and Europe
Why is the audience for Lovefield different from that of Insidious?	Mixture of genres Good educational tool The audience that would watch this short film would be mainly students, thought this because of mainly the comments that were made ‘currently studying this in English lesson’.

Task 3: Secondary research

Use secondary research methods to gather information for both Insidious and Lovefield (general information, viewing statistics and box office returns etc.) – say where you found the information and whether you think the information is accurate or not and why:

Insidious

Genre: Horror – Supernatural/Thriller Producer: Jason Blum, Oren Peli and Steven Schneider Directed: James Wan Written by:Leigh Whannell Composer: Joseph Bishara Domestic lifetime grosses (America): $54,009,1250 Domestic DVD Sales: $7,302,807 Foreign lifetime grosses: $43,000,000 Worldwide: $97,009,150 Domestic opening weekend: $13,271,464 Production Budget: $1.5 million Insidious’s audience was 60% under 25 years old and was an even split between the genders. Over its time it attracted older and more females by 55% over time.  Research Intro: For primary research we conducted a focus group to create a profile about Insidious, this included age, gender, ethnicity, demographics and geodemographics. When completed the profile of what we thought we then looked in to secondary research to find out the accurate information, we done this by looking on to different websites. Some of the information that we thought came close to being correct, such as the age as we found out that 60% of under 25’s went to watch this film which we said the age range was 15 – 24 and it was more of a 50/50% of both genders, which as a focus group we decided was a 60% - 40% male. The Ethnicity and geodemographics results of what we thought was correct as we believed that people from the USA and UK would go to watch it, the secondary research shown us that the lifetime grosses in America and the UK was much higher than any other country. The secondary research information that I found was from different websites such as IMDB and Box Office Mojo, I think that the information is accurate because on both of the websites they have the same information given about the movie and it shows that we as a focus group was close to the results that we had given. http://boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3148&p=.htm http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1591095/ (websites which the information was found on)

Lovefield

Genre: Short Drama/Horror Directed: Mathieu Ratthe Written by: Mathieu Ratthe Producer: Mathieu Ratthe Funded by: Matt Ratt Productions YouTube Views: 1,015,390 YouTube reviews: studying the video in English lessons (shows that its good for educational use), people who are interested in making and watching short films, enjoy the characters acting and the bird, other people who interested in film making and would like feed back about their projects. YouTube Profiles: Jessica, Female, UK and is a student Male, Middle age, Surgeon, interests in watching short films Male, 21, United States, Student, interested in creating short films and viewing others. Research Intro: For primary research for Lovefield short movie, we conducted another focus group to create a profile for it. This again included the age, ethnicity, gender and demographics. During in the focus group we believed that amateur filmmakers who are studying media and film in college would watch this so that they are able to analyse and example of a short film. We believe that North American and European audiences would watch this mainly because of the name of the creator which is Mathieu Ratthe, the gender we agreed would be 50/50 as students would be the main ones that would watch this short film, so it would be equal to who watches it and demographics we believed would be C – E for students and lower class audiences. In the secondary research to find out if any of the information was correct we searched on the internet and looked at different audiences YouTube channels that have commented on the video Lovefield to find out more information on the people that watch it, searching through finding this information I found out that a lot of the people who have commented on it are currently analysing the video in an English lesson which shows that it is a good use of an educational tool or have a huge interest in making short films and commenting on this video to get feedback themselves form off the viewers from Lovefield. This information that I researched up shows that as a focus group the results came accurate of what we thought and what we found out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4meeZifCVro (Website which the information was found on)

Task 4: Present Results

Using your research results create an audience profile in Photoshop or as a blog post.Present the following information for each film:

Introduction – say how methods have been used to research and define audiences for the products and how successful the methods have been.

1.     Name and general information (director, release date, certificate etc.)

2.     Statistical data (audience, box office returns)

3.     Focus group results

Conclusion – Describe how the research differs for each film and how accurate you think the findings are.

Say whether the quantitative and qualitative research correlates (do they match and why).

Describe how the research results for each film differ in terms of how a producer would see the audience profile (does the UK film council research fit with your results?).