Audience Profile

Once we conducted our research we were able to develop a firm understanding of our target audience, prior to the basic idea that served as a guide in the creation of our questionnaire. Using the conclusions we drew from our research, we were able to complete an audience profile and determine our finalised target audience.

Demographics:

·         Age: 15-25

·         Sex: Both

·         Our chosen TV channel and scheduling to broadcast our soap opera will be influenced by the age demographic of our target audience. BBC1 and Channel 4 proved to be the most prevalent of channels and we can deduce that this is due to the contrasting aspects of the national reverence of the BBC and the youthful visions of Channel 4. Viewers may well know the BBC for their peak time slots filled with programmes that attract mass audiences, such as Eastenders. On the other hand, while Channel 4 do not have predominantly valued peak times, their ethos of being an innovative, creative and diverse channel means a younger audience is drawn to their promise of a variety of cultures, locations and circumstances that represent their lives today.

Social and psychological factors:

·         Our target audiences’ preferred time of viewing is the late evening slot around 7/8/9pm. This is due to the lack of free time in their schedule, e.g.  because of school, university and/or work.

·         This schedule also would affect the amount of times a week they are able to watch Soap Operas; we discovered that our target audience would only view or want to watch a Soap three times a week.

·         Through our research, we discovered the audience’s preferences towards the nature of the soap and successful audience pleasures. With none of our participants selecting ‘Neighbours’ as their favoured soap, we realised that audiences find comfort and pleasure in storylines, settings, scenes and characters that they can relate to. Therefore, as ‘Neighbours’ is set in Australia, audiences may be deterred by the change of surroundings, accent and lack of familiar lifestyle. In conclusion, it would be more beneficial for our soap to be set in the UK as to not dissuade viewers with unrelateable material.

·         Furthermore, we discovered that a popular choice of soap is ‘Coronation Street’, and we could hypothesise that this is due to the humour and comedy element that is lacking in the other soaps.

·         However, it also appears that audiences find pleasure in the most dramatic and dark of storylines with murder and crime being a popular choice for our questionnaire participants. It seems that with realistic characters and misé-en-scene the audience can partake in suspended disbelief as they build relationships with characters, which then makes for more of an impact when dramatic scenes are suddenly thrust upon the audience.