Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

In terms of ancillary feedback, we sketched out our main three ideas for our magazine advert as a small poster and then used the website ‘Poll Everywhere’ in order to gain feedback on which magazine advert design looks the most effective. The website 'Poll Everywhere' is a very effective method of feedback because we could use a large group of students aged 16-20 from our target audience to vote for their favourite poster meaning that the poster will be catered towards our audience and what they like and dislike. The only downfall with the bar chart form of poll everywhere is that the members of the audience cannot comment on why they like one poster more than the other or whether they liked certain aspects of two different posters. However the bar chart is a quick and easy way of discovering the most popular poster design and we can develop it further by asking members of the audience after the poll. To conduct the poll, we labelled the three designs and attached them to a board. We then set up the poll and asked a large group if people in the room to text in either A, B or C to the poll and vote for which poster looks the best. Poster A received the most votes with 50% and so we used this as a basis for the development of our magazine advert:



We used ‘Poll Everywhere’ again for the next piece of feedback on our ancillary tasks. We used a ‘comment wall’ and asked the question ‘What are your opinions on our digipak?’ Again we attached the image of the digipak on the wall at the front of the room and asked the people in the room to text the number with comments about what they thought about our digipak. The comments were all very positive with the most popular comment being about the use of selective colour. The red lips stand out dramatically against the black and white filter while other comments were about the typography looking effective. This form of 'Poll Everywhere' is more useful because the audience can comment on what they think about the digi-pak and this way we know exactly what is working well and we know exactly what we need to improve:

I wanted more in depth feedback on both the digipak and the magazine advert and so decided that the best way to do this was to post both images of the products onto a social media site. I decided to use Facebook because it is the most popular site which meant I would receive a lot of feedback. I asked our audience to post in the comment section their opinions on the ancillary tasks.

Posting on a social media site resulted in being an extremely effective way of receiving feedback from our demographic. Because the people commenting were my Facebook ‘friends’ they were aged between 16 and 30 and this was the target age range for our product. Using Facebook also means that I have taken the audience habits of my psychographic into consideration because Facebook is an extremely popular method of communication and sharing data by our target age group and Facebook is place where they explore new products and videos. The overall reaction was extremely positive with repetitive comments about the black and white filter, the selective colour and typography as well as comments about the interesting images used on the digipak. There are also repetitive comments about how eye catching the two ancillaries’ are, which a very good piece of feedback because the purpose of the magazine advert is to advertise. There is also one comment about the images creating a clear selling point which is helpful feedback coming from our target audience. From this feedback it is very clear that our demographic enjoyed the two products and it is also clear that the two products possess effective synergy, mostly linked by the use of filter, selective colour and typography. One downfall of using Facebook was that the people commenting were my 'friends' which meant they could have been biased however they could comment whatever they wanted and because some comments were repeated it suggests that this is an honest answer and lets us know that this aspect of the digipak is successful because it has been mentioned multiple times.

We posted the three versions of our music video on YouTube and this is useful in attracting the target audience because our music videos appear in the ‘suggested’ section to the right side of the screen when the audience is viewing our artist, Natalie Lungley’s, music. This means that the audience who is interested in Natalie Lungley’s music will notice our music video on the page and may be interested in viewing it. We also received a comment on our music video on YouTube from a person who is impartial to the school or my media course and this comment is incredibly positive and compliments our camerawork and editing. This is important feedback because it suggests that the production is appealing to an audience other than students at school. The image also shows the amount of views received in just under a month which is a positive indication that the video is successfully being noticed by YouTube users.

Overall I feel as though we have used many forms of feedback during the different stages of planning and developing our three music promotion products. The feedback has proved to be incredibly helpful with our development and how we have improved the products. All of the audience who we have asked have been aged between 16 and 30 meaning that we have successfully gathered feedback from our target audience and catered our product towards our selected demographic. The methods of getting the feedback have also been aimed towards the correct psychographics and socio-economic class. The importance of gathering feedback from the correct target audience cannot be under stressed and we think that the results of our various feedbacks can be seen to be acted upon when viewing our three final products.

Facebook feedback from Dsquared, a Web Software Engineer company:

One of my Facebook friends saw the ancillaries that I posted on Facebook and he works at a media company. He messaged me asking if I wanted any feedback from him and his co-workers at the Web Software Engineer company:



He mentioned that there were a few things that could be improved in order to make the ancillary tasks more effective. He asked if our typography had different weights and I replied that we had added a drop shadow to the texts in order to make it more bold against the background. He then mentioned that I could use the clone stamp tool in order to make the background more blurred and darker so that the text would not need a drop shadow and would still stand out. These were some of his messages:

Below the image on the left is our original ancillary Magazine advert and then the image on the right is a quickly made example that Jason and his colleagues created to explain what they meant about darkening the background and using the clone stamp to remove the window frame:

 

It was interesting to receive feedback from someone who works in a media based job and who has extensive knowledge of how to use software such as Photoshop because we received a piece of feedback that we had not received in any other method. It proved that posting the ancillaries to Facebook was a great way to receive feedback and not just on the post asking people's opinions. Facebook proved to be an effective way of catching people's attention and getting a great range of responses about our products, while even though Jason was a Facebook 'friend' his work colleagues helped to explain and edit the feedback whom I do not know and so the feedback was honest and effective.