For this assignment i have to create an audience profile for the film - 2001: A space odyssey. Audience profiles are used by companies such as BARB (Broadcasters' Audience Research Board) to help create a product tailored to a certain group of people. Getting the correct audience profile is especially important to when advertising a product, as if you advertise to the correct market your product is more likely to sell well.
To try and obtain an idea of the target audiences for the film i chose, which was 2001: A Space Odyssey i decided to first create a questionnaire and send it out to my classmates. The questionnaire included general questions such as questions about how many films per week on average does the person watch that is answering. This helps to get an idea of how interested in films that person is and therefore they would possibly have a better understanding of films and target audiences in general. The other questions are mainly to do with the film and what kind of people that it is suitable for. These questions include simply asking the age of the person and what age ranges do they think the film would be suitable for.
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In order to obtain some quantitative data, i used a website called IMDB to find out what their results say about the type of people that would enjoy this film.
Here is a table showing results of a survey that movie review website IMDb has carried out. From this table it can give us an idea of the type of people that enjoy this film the most. The numbers on the end of the red and blue bars shows the average score, out of 10 that these people have rated the film.
Looking at the table's scores, we can establish that the people that enjoy this film on average the most is males under 18, as they have given this film an average score of 8.8/10. Also judging by this table, the people that enjoy this film the least are females aged 45+, as they have only given the film a 7.4/10. Therefore in the case of IMDb reviewers, the target audience should be for mainly males under 18.
Looking at the table's scores, we can establish that the people that enjoy this film on average the most is males under 18, as they have given this film an average score of 8.8/10. Also judging by this table, the people that enjoy this film the least are females aged 45+, as they have only given the film a 7.4/10. Therefore in the case of IMDb reviewers, the target audience should be for mainly males under 18.
This is a table from my own questionnaire. This simply shows that all of the people that answered my survey were between the ages of 16 - 24. This means that they may not be as mature as older people that understand the films industry more, but are old enough to understand the film and make a decision on who should be watching it.
And this table shows that everybody that answered the survey were male. This may be unfair as it would be good to have some female responses as they may have different ideas than males about the film. There is also a question in my questionnaire asking the social status, which in all cases they answered student. Therefore i know everybody that did the survey is a student.
Whilst this question is quite vague, it shows that the majority of people would think that adults (18+) would enjoy this film more than anybody else, with only one response being teenagers (13-17). In this case, the people that answered my survey don't particularly agree with the IMDb results, that claim that the people that enjoy the film the most are under 18's, but infact older than that and adults.
This table shows the responses for the gender question. In most cases, they believe that the male audience will enjoy this film more, with the most votes being for male. Nobody from my questionnaire voted for female, but a few did vote for the film not being gender specific, which supports the IMDb theory that males enjoy the film more.
This question was my example of qualitative data, as i asked them to first answer the question, which the majority said yes, and then asked them to comment on why they think what they do. This is what 5 of the respondent's said:
From these comments we can see that because the film is a classic and the topic of the film, space exploration, modern day people would enjoy this film. On the other hand, the bottom response, from a "no" answer, says that the film is old fashioned and won't live up to the standards of modern films, for example Avatar.
I asked this question to try and find out more about my audience. As shown, most of the respondents only watched between 1-2 films each week, but one of them did watch between 3-5. I looked into this response, and the person who watches 3-5 films a week answered "no" to the previous question, this maybe because he/she is used to watching high quality films and modern films, so this film doesn't live up to the standards he is expecting.
In conclusion, after watching the film for myself i agree with the majority of results that i have collected both from my own questionnaire that the type of people that will typically enjoy this film will be male, and most likely over 18, as i think this film is quite hard to understand and it is also quite violent in places so not possibly suitable for kids.