Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

We decided that an appropriate primary audience for Turning Pages would be 16-24 year old females, due to the themes of love, friendship and growing up. We also drew up profiles of two secondary audiences, 16-24 year old males, and couples in their thirties. During the planning stages of the production process, we paid particular attention to aspects such as characters, style and events, keeping audience experience and pleasure in mind the whole time.

In a report on avid cinema-goers published by the British Film Institute, we found that:

• Just over 40% of all cinema-goers are of the 15-24 audience bracket.
• Members of this age bracket go to the cinema at least once a month
• Film for this audience is a way of forming identity, and therefore, young people between the ages of 15 and 24 often turn to independent films as a means of escaping mainstream, Hollywood productions.

Using this information we constructed a core audience profile-

Age: 16-24

Gender: Female

Occupation: Student (likely to be studying film/media/English-related courses)

Class: Middle-class

Interests: Film, photography, literature, culture, theatre, history, museums

We also had two wider audience groups that we wanted to appeal to through Turning Pages:

1) Young males between the ages of 16-24- would also have an interest in independent and small-budget films, and would be attracted by the inclusion of good-looking female characters

2) Older couples (30+)- through a sense of nostalgia of the days of their youth, they would be able to attach sentiments to the film and they would be able to relate to Lila, Noah and Jess. Also, the themes of family and loss are perhaps more relative to this audience than the younger audience groups. 

Entertainment Film Distributors have expertise in distributing British films to British audiences, and people interested in the film industry will be able to associate this particular distributor with high-quality, British audiences, which could be a possible technique of marketing to both our core and wider audience groups. One issue associated with marketing to young audiences is film piracy- the 16-24 age group accounts for 71% of Internet users downloading film. For a low-budget film like Turning Pages, the marketing budget is also likely to be relatively low, and hence incoming revenue will initially be low. To lose potential sales through film piracy could be detrimental for both the production company and the distributor.