PLANNING: MY TARGET AUDIENCE

A target audience is “a particular group at which a product such as a film or advertisement 

is aimed”. Audiences are profiled by brands in a variety of ways such as demographics, 

psychographics, age, gender, social status and so on. Therefore, I needed to define my 

target audience, its needs and gratifications. In order to reach our target audience, we 

needed to develop various strategies of engagement, to attract and address them. 

Consequently, we needed to consider the applicable factors (age, sexual orientation, 

ethnicity, social class and their media needs), with the goal of producing a product that they 

want.

Our primary target audience consists of viewers in the age range of 15 and older, 

furthermore, we aim to draw in a primarily younger audiences, varying from late teens to 

young adults. We believe the mature themes, along with the complexity of our storyline,  

tend to target a predominately sophisticated audience. Through further research of The 

British Board of Film Classification's website, I was able to explore the various themes 

which determine a age 15 category. These of which included; dangerous behaviour, 

discrimination, drugs, language, nudity, sex, sexual violence, threat, horror and violence.

We believe that the material we are screen is suitable for the classification of a 15. 

Furthermore, by classing our film as a 15, we are able to target a wider audience and thus 

promote our film trailer further. In terms film classification, we believe the following themes 

are integrated and insinuated into our film trailer; 

• Dangerous behaviour: In example, self-harm. Whether the depiction is easily 

• accessible weapons is acceptable will depend on factors such as realism, context and setting. 

• Threat and horror: a sustained focus on sadistic threat is likely to be unacceptable

• Violence: Violence may be strong but should not dwell on the infliction of pain of injury. The strongest gory images are unlikely to be acceptable. Strong sadisitic violence is also unacceptable. 

Due to the predominant age group targeted your film it is likely our audience are "media 

savy" - communicating about their everyday lives through social platforms such as 

instagram and twitter. Therefore, it is highly likely they would access information about the 

film in similar ways i.e social media feeds.  Through further research I discovered "58 

percent of respondents aged between 16-24 years reported using Netflix" - Satistica. From 

this information we are able to conclude that our target audience use the internet to stream 

films from online services such as Netflix, Prime and Youtube. This is important information 

as the majority of newly released film trailers targeting similar genre and themes are 

previewed in cinemas. Therefore we can further understand the importance of exploiting 

alternate measures such as social media to reach our desired audiences. 

Our film trailer predominantly focuses on drawing in audiences which favour the thriller 

genre, as this is our controlling category. Films with a similar target audience would include; 

gone girl, a quiet place and silence of the lambs. All of which grip their audience through 

enigma, mystery and climax.