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Post #24- Target Audience

Establishing a target audience is immensely important when deciding what meaning you will be encoding in your film. A target audience is a group of people that a piece of media is intended to reach. This is usually based on age, gender, cultural background, and values or interests. By applying conventions that these groups particularly enjoy, certain types of content may not interest other groups which can make it difficult to gain new and larger audiences.

By understanding and deciding upon a target audience, producers like myself can make decisions that are relevant to that audience such as marketing techniques, genre conventions, and the overall meaning. When a producer does not clearly express their audience, their content tends to not be successful because audiences are not fond of the techniques utilized. For this reason, the target audience of my film is athletes, prior athletes, coaches, and sports enthusiasts in the age range of 13-45 of any gender. 

This has aided me in making fundamental decisions for my documentary excerpt. Regarding marketing techniques, I have chosen to use age relevant or familiar social media apps in order to market my excerpt. This will allow me to reach my intended audience because they are within the age group that uses these apps most. Relevant genre conventions consist of genuine emotion, deep narratives, jump cutting, cutaways, and sound bridges. Athletes as well as the other audience members listed, enjoy these conventions and techniques shown in other sports documentaries. By concluding this observation, I have decided to use some of these techniques in my final product to ensure I reach the target audience. For reference, I have encoded the meaning that cheer is a sport that brings peace and security to athletes whilst still depicting the hardships of the demanding sport. By doing this, I'm capturing genuine emotion from my interviewees who are athletes and coaches, but I'm also expressing a deep narrative by focusing on the emotional aspect of cheer. Fast editing will also be utilized when showing montages of clips from practices and competition which keep viewers intrigued. 



Another tool that can be utilized to attract a target audience is credibility of ethos. The use of ethos refers to utilizing authoritative or trustworthy figures to discuss topics relevant to their field of work or study. In my case, I have decided to cast Coach Hatcher and Coach Cianci as interviewees. This will establish credibility because they are well-known coaches who have led their varsity team to become triple crown champions. Because of this impressive resume, my target audience will trust what these members have to say and therefore, indulge in my film and hopefully, spread positive press regarding my production. 


All tools discussed are impressive ways of attracting an intended audience and all techniques will be utilized to my advantage. 



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