Target AudienceJoey Carabini, Tom Glasgow, Charlie Smith

A target audience is simply who the producers of the film are trying to appeal to.

This includes the age, lifestyle, location, etc. of people interested in particular films.

Both primary and secondary research can be conducted in order to help identify the target audience.

Identifying the target audience allows for more effective promotion of the film, i.e. strategic advertisement placement.

What is a Target Audience?

Segmenting the audience means dividing the market into various sections based on certain factors and trends of film watchers. For example, we may find that 70% of people who watch slasher films are males between 20-30.

Different people have different tastes in music. Some people prefer to comedies, some prefer horrors, etc. Some cinema-goers prefer Hollywood films produced on big budget with lots of CGI and so on, whilst others prefer indpendent films with small budgets.

Once we have narrowed it down to which genre our film will be, we must select a sub-genre within that genre. This will also have an effect on who the film will appeal to as not everyone who likes horror movies will enjoy comedy horrors and some people may strictly be interested in just slasher films.

Statistics are always helpful when segmenting the audience. Segmentation of the audience is helpful during the promotion stage

because it allows the producers to identify a target audience and appeal to them. For example, if Disney are making a new animated film for young children they should advertise it on daytime TV when young kids are watching with their parents.

Segmenting the Audience

The target audience for our OTS will be people with an interest in horror movies, particularly slasher, and independent films.

An example of an idependent horror film which was hugely successful is Paranormal Activity. We could target a similar audience with our OTS.

An example of a successful slasher film is Scream. The Scream films attract a large audience, meaning that we could potentially also target this segment film consumers.

We will segment the audience in order to spot trends in the market. We will want to know who watches slasher films and who watches independent horror films.

Our Target Audience

The most important thing is to make our sub-genre clear in our OTS. We are doing this by including the conventions of the slasher sub-genre and reinforcing the most typical feature, e.g. remote setting with vulnerable, naïve characters.

We also want to involve dramatic irony, meaning the audience are always more aware of the dangers surrounding the characters than the characters are. This is a common technique used in horror films, especially slasher films, to build up tension.

Another technique we will use to build suspense is narrative enigmas. This means that we won’t reveal everything in our OTS, giving the audience an incentive to watch the entire film. One way in which we will do this is by showing multiple P.O.V shots from the killer but without ever revealing the killer.

How we will Appeal to our Target Audience