Target Audience

Our initial idea was to use an age group for our target market and make the advert around appealing to that specific audience. However we have decided against this and instead we are going to use one of the categories from Young and Rubicam, who devised a system of categorizing people into seven groups; The Mainstream, The Reformer, The Aspirer, The Explorer, The Succeeder, The Resigned and The Struggler. After having researched these seven categories and what they each represent we have decided on 'The Mainstream':

 'These are people who live in the world of the domestic
and the everyday. A daily routine is fundamental to the way they live their
lives. Their life choices are ‘we’ rather than ‘me’.
As their name implies, they are the mainstream of society.
They are the largest group of people within 4Cs across
the world. They respond to big established brands, to ‘family’
brands and to offers of value for money. Their core need in life is for security.'

From this, we can highlight a few elements which we will apply to our target market including
1. Affordable prices (perhaps also with family deals)- as value for money has been noted.
2. Fashion glasses- mainstream keep with popular current trends.
3. Our advert will relate to them- we will create a typical daily routine and lifestyle to work our 'message' around.

Reason for choice of category: They are the largest group of people within 4C's across the world (they make up 40% of the population), meaning that we are reaching to a great number of people and therefore increasing sales because of our advert appealing to a wider audience. We have also found research that corresponds with the 'Mainstream' views such as Consumer Reports National Research Centre who surveyed 92,000 eyeglass buyers and found that less than half reported that they were satisfied with the price they had paid for eyewear. Using this secondary research, we have noted the importance of price in selling our product. It is also currently a popular sales technique in the glasses market today to emphasize 'value for money' for example the 2 for 1 offer at Specsavers. As a group, we also have most knowledge on this particular category and therefore it will be most beneficial to us to choose it for our target audience.

Questionnaire Results

These are the results of our audience questionnaire which establishes the preferences of the majority of people. We need to know what the majority of people want from a spectacle brand because our target audience is mainstream; having a mainstream audience means that we have to ensure our glasses are exactly what they are looking for. Our questionnaire consisted of 31 people aged between 12 to 80 but we thought it necessary to concentrate on the people who classed themselves as Mainstreamers, seeing as this is our target audience. Out of the 31 people, there were 17 who classed themselves as Mainstreamers. The majorities' preferences established from this research as follows:

Non designer
Glasses priced between £31 to £40
2 glasses for the price of 1
Prefer to wear glasses rather than contact lenses and laser eye surgery
Comfort

Therefore we will take all of this information into consideration when designing our glasses and ensure to apply this to our product.

Questionnaire

Questionnaire to finds how our advert will reach our target audience most effectively. 

-We preseneted to those involved in the questionnaire brief desciriptions of the 7 categories (Young and Rubicam) and asked them to choose which one they felt they fell under (as they would with age groups).

1.What category do you fit into out of the following? 
      a.The mainstreamer
b.The reformer
c.The aspirer
d.The explorer
e.The succeeder
f.The resigned
g.The struggler

2. What Glasses would you normally buy? (please tick one of the following)

a. Designer Brands

b. Non-Designer brand

3. How much are you willing to pay for a pair of frames? (please tick one of the following)

b. Between £10 and £30

c. Between £31 and £60

d. Between £61 and £90

e. Over £90

     4. What is your most desired choice of eyewear? (taking into account prices, please tick one of the following)
        a. Eye Glasses

        b. Contact Lenses

        c. Laser eye surgery

       

    5. Ideally, what would you consider to be the best deal? (please tick one of the following)

        a. 2 for 1 on glasses
        b. One pair of glasses with free trial contact lenses for a month
        c. One pair of glasses plus free glasses for member of family under 16
        d. Other- please state

   6.  Do you base your choice of eyewear on:(please tick one of the following)
       a. Fashion
       b.Comfort
       c. Necessity

Research for Specsavers Advert

This is an advert for Specsavers created by another A2 Media Student. This is cleverly done because at the beginning you are not sure what the advert is about and the more you watch more more drawn in the audience become and the more they begin to see what the advert is for. Although no dialogue is used, there is a Specsavers Logo at the end and it is still quite clear before that what the advert is promoting. We like the idea of having no or little dialogue between actors; this requires the audience to stay focused and therefore keeping their attention on what the advert is about. There is a element of humour typically used in Specsavers adverts and this advert is the same.

The location used makes it much easier to film and we know this from our previous AS work, using a house makes it much easier to control what is going on around you unlike if you are shooting outside where there can be many complications such as amount of sunlight and unpredictable weather. 

Main Task - Specsavers

We have been researching thoroughly adverts for energy drinks, both professional and adverts created by other Media students. We have been discussing ideas of how we could make our own advert and we think that it will be quite diffucult for us to create a realistic advert because the professinal adverts consist of athletes performing amazing stunts and we do not have any way to recreate this ourselves.
We have decided on a final idea and we have chosen to do an advert for Specsavers. We chose this because we can create a funny and rememberable advert and we already have ideas of how we are going to create the advert and who the actors can be.

Specsavers don't have just one specific target audience who they aim their adverts towards; it varies depending on the types of glasses they are trying to sell and/or what special deals they are offering.

SPECSAVERS SHEEPDOG ADVERT:

We have researched many adverts created by Specsavers and almost every advert is made to make you laugh. The advert above is the man who shaves his sheep and then his sheepdog because he cannot tell which is which and this catches the audiences attention therefore they remember what the advert is about. Also the advert is very obviously for glasses, telling the audience that this man cannot see but if you go to Specsavers that can be fixed and this ultimately draws the audience into buying it and the product seems desireable for people that need glasses. It does not include any dialogue from the actor, the only speaking your hear is a voice-over at the end promoting an offer for over 60's, and this is a clever way to attract a wider market.
This advert is in black and white, unlike the majority of adverts for Specsavers which are in colour and this immediately tells us that they are targeting an older audience. We can tell this because people who are over 60 will be used to watching television or movies that were in black and white and having an advert in this colour attracts them and catches their attention.
There is only one actor in this advert and this shows that this person has got his independence, which seems desierable for the target audience who still want to feel independent in their old age. The way that Specsavers are potraying their glasses is that you can have them and become more independent than you already are. Also the fact that this actor shows good work ethic and is still working at his age keeps the audiences attention and makes the advert more attractive to them.


SPECSAVERS OVER 60'S ADVERT:

The second advert shown is also targeted at over 60's; as you can clearly tell by the people who are acting. This also is a typical Specsavers advert because the storyline of the advert is an elderly couple looking for somewhere to eat their lunch and think that this roller coaster ride is a nice bench to sit on and they get a surprise when the ride starts. This grabs the audiences attention and keeps them focused on the advert because up to this point it is not clear what it is exactly about. At the end of the advert you hear the man ask 'what sort of cheese was that?' and the Specsavers logo appears on the screen, telling the audience what the advert was about and they also include a promotional offer of 30% off for over 60's, which is an appealing offer to attract more customers. The way that this couple is portrayed makes them seem vulnerable and they look very naive. The way that Specsavers have made their glasses seem like something that is nessesary and desierable to give people more confidence and security knowing that something like this will not happen to them.
We feel that this type of advert will be much more suited to our skills and will allow us to be creative, in terms of location, actors and storyline. Both of the adverts shown are targeted at over 60's and this is likely to be because your eye sight begins to get worse from this age, therefore the offers and adverts are made to attract this particular audience.

We began thinking about Todorov's theory: situation, problem, resolution and how Specsavers use this theory in their adverts. The situation will be at the start of the advert, in this example getting the child ready for school and dropping them off. The problem is when the child is picked up from school and realising that it is the wrong child and the resolution is to go to Specsavers.

Red Bull Advert

This is an advert for Red Bull, it is full of eye catching scenes and is a feel good advert. This is one of the adverts that gave us inspiration to concentrate on energy drinks. It starts with slow but dramatic music and a few shots filmed from a helicopter, this gives the audinece a good picture of where the advert is set. It then has a few shots of athletes and a voice over saying 'The challenge of my life is to find out how far I can take it.' This grabs the audiences attention and from the shots they can see they can presume that there will be some amazing stunts performed or extremely dangerous stunts and this makes them intrigued to watch. Once the stunts actually start the music becomes louder and more powerful and you can also hear the sports men voice overs aswell, and once all the stunts are finished the music gets slower and quieter again and you hear a voice over saying 'If you believe in it, anything is possible.' This is a message they are trying to send out the audinece, promoting their drink by saying it can make you believe and achieve things you can only dream of and this makes it desireable for the audience. We like the idea of having music like this because it builds up in the middle and the start and finish are calm, this creates more impact on the shots and keeps the audiences attention.
They have used montage editing to switch between athletes and this is really effective because the clips of each person and very short but it still creates an impact on the audience. They have also used slow motion effects to make it more dramatic and this emphasises the stunts being showen, we think this is something we will most likely use because it an easy technique to use and has a big impact. Shots they have used consist of birds eye-view shots, extreme close ups, medium and long shots, also panning shots and high angle shots, and this variety gives the audience a view from every angle and makes the stunts look even more amazing. The reason that they use this footage in their advert is to say that if you drink Red Bull, you will feel able to acomplish anything you want and everything is possible. They have used all these techniques to make Red Bull seem desireable and this is how we want our aduience to feel about the advert that we make for an energy drink, therefore we will be using this advert as something to look at and refer to which will make our advert extremely effective.

Final Chosen Brief

After talking together as a group, we think that it would be better if we did an advert for something different rather than a perfume advert. We thought this because in our AS project we included only one person and this would be the same if we chose to do a perfume advert for A2. After a lot of thought, we have decided to do something that we can be more creative with and use our imagination a bit more, something that is entirely different to our first idea. We have been researching on YouTube and we have decided to do an advert for an energy drink. This allows us to create something eye catching and exciting, whereas filming a perfume advert, although we have good knowledge in this area, would be similar to other perfume adverts and we will be very limited in how we can shoot it overall.

Chosen Brief and Ideas

For our main task we are going to do an advertising package for a new product or service, to include two TV advertisements:

1. A TV programme sponsorship sequence
2.A web pop-up

We have chosen to do an advert rather than any of the other 14 briefs that we were given because we are all extremely familiar with TV adverts and this gives us the chance to show off our skills and be really creative in the process. We want to make it look professional and we get a wide variety of choices when choosing to do an advert because there are many products that we can use.
While doing research on other A2 adverts we have found that many girl groups do advertisements for either a makeup or perfume, therefore we are considering to use this as our chosen brief. We all can relate to these adverts and we have a good understanding of how they want the product to be portrayed and we can use this knowledge to our advantage when doing the project.

These two are both advertisements for a perfume produced by a media student as an A2 project. I think that they have done extremely way sticking to the way a typical teenage perfume advert would be; they have used one person, using music to match the way they want you to feel about the fragrance and making the whole thing happy and smiley. The first one is more of a girly fragrance and you can tell this by the music being used and the way the girl in the advert is acting and her expressions, whereas the second advert is more of the girl jumping around and laughing and the music is very catchy.

This is an advert which is similar the the first advert that I talked about done by the A Level students. It has similar music and only consists of one girl actress. They have tried to make their advert as typical to a proper advert as they could and we think it will be a good idea to make a perfume advert due to the fact that we are a groups of girls and there are a lot of ways to conform to typical conventions used in a perfume advert.

Self Evaluation of Foundation Portfolio

Research:
Looking back at my AS Media project in terms of research, I feel that I gathered a large amount and focused on all the areas that I could in great deapth. Our Opening Sequence was a psychological thriller and there are many films in this genre that have openings which gave us good insight on how to make it clear of the genre in the first two minutes, they also gave us inspiration and ideas on what we could do for ours. We watched many opening sequences on YouTube and I also watched movies that I had on DVD and this also improved our research.
I think that although I did a lot of research on YouTube looking at openings for movies in the same genre and watching the openings of movies on DVD, I think that it would have widened my knowledge and improved my research if I had watched more opening sequences from other AS projects on YouTube and gathered ideas from there, this is something that I am going to concentrate on in my A2 project. I will ensure that both myself and my group have a wide understanding of how other A2 projects have achieved good marks and how we can improve on our success from our AS project.

Planning:
In planning I feel that we did as much as we could for our genre. We watched many clips on YouTube and planned our sequence as well as we could, although it was slightly rushed. At the beginning we had an idea of doing a psychological thriller and we had done a test run in the house that we planned to do the opening in. The test run went well and we had then began to develop our idea. After a while of thinking on how to improve it, we came up with a whole new idea and although we had to start again from scratch, the planning we had done for our previous idea gave us a better understanding on how to start the planning for our second idea and this helped us to get it done faster and properly.

Editing:
The editing for our opening sequence took an extremely long time due to the fact that we used a lot of angles with the camera and many different effects on the Macs. We made sure that when we shot the opening sequence we didn't have only one angle for each shot and that we would not have any movement missed by the camera. We managed to get all our filming done in one day and this was useful because we didn't have to come back and try to make things look identical to the way it did before. We edited the lighting and contrast in every shot, making sure it matched our genres conventions. I feel that the editing we used had a good impact on our final mark becuase we spent many hours watching the clip and changing things so that there was nothing to take away any marks.
The music we used also matched the typical genre convenions of a psychological thriller because it was quite spooky and put the audience on edge, and because we had no speaking this added to the suspense and makes the audience want to watch more.

Final Product:
I think that overall our final product emphasised the skills each member of our group had and seeing as this was our first proper project, we did extremely well. We researched and planned as much as we could and used all of our knowledge and put it into our final task. I think the one thing that we could have done to improve would be if we had researched a little more on other AS media projects and used their work to our advantage. In our A2 project we will use all of our knowledge that we gathered from our AS project and this will be used to enure that we acheieve a better mark than we did in AS.