A level media studies – evaluating my coursework final

EVALUATION 4 – How did you attract/ address

your audience?Jessica Foster

I have used an incredibly large variety of factors in order to represent a particular target audience of females, aged 10-16. These factors include – Colour SchemeThe colour scheme I chose for my magazine is bright and bold colours, not only to reflect the teen, female audience, but also to reflect the season of issue, being summer. The colours I used continually throughout are mainly yellows, pinks, and purples. For example, the blouse the model on my main front cover is wearing coloured blue and pink. These colours together give young, bubbly vibe. This can both suggest that this is the personality of the model, and can also have the effect of customers aspiring to be this way, and therefore find this very appealing. Also, as it is bold colours that have been used, this will capture the attention of many passers by, and will draw their eye to my magazine on the shelf. Bright, bold, girly colours are more thought of to appeal to persons of my target audience (girls, aged 10-16), and this will specifically appeal to these people in particular.

Images / PhotographsFrom my analysis of various existing teen pop magazines, I concluded that the people in the featured images tend to be popular, current female music artists, as well as young, attractive male artists. Therefore, I chose to photograph young males and females, and give them the appearance of current music artists. When photographing them, I chose to remain simple, only photographing them with plain backgrounds and no distracting surroundings. I found this was a common feature of other photographs when conducting my analysis of other existing magazines. I chose to edit my photographs using the software Photoshop cs, in order to give my images a finished, professional look, as though they could be seen in a genuine magazine. I feel this did the job sufficiently. As you can see below, I have managed to alter the lighting and contrast setting in my images. Although subtle changes, it has definitely improved to appearance of my images.

ContentI wanted to ensure that the content of my magazine would be highly appealing to teen girls. I ensured this through my use and analysis of questionnaires, and current existing magazines. For example, I have included pieces on celebrity gossip and music tours, both seen as highly appealing to teen girls, as I can tell from the information I have gathered. I only distributed my questionnaires to females who are within my target audience, so I can ensure that all the results I received are perfectly valid. As a result, I found they were of great use to me when constructing my magazine. Also, I wanted to make sure that I remained tightly within the realms of my chosen genre when selecting my content. For example, I restricted myself to only including features with a music related topic. I would not have included a piece regarding fashion or makeup, as I don’t feel it would have been relevant.