1. Media
Documentary: Deciding a target audience inc. Age, Social class, Gender
While choosing which topic my group and I would focus on in our documentary we had to take many
things into consideration such as the purpose of the documentary and also the target audience. We
knew the purpose had to be clear and had to appeal to the target audience.
After much deliberation we eventually decided that our documentary would be primarily aimed
towards a younger teenage to early twenty audience.
One of the main reasons for this is because we
discovered through a recent poll conducted in 2010
that this is primarily the age when people begin to
experiment with drugs. While drugs do affect many
different people throughout the UK we decided our
documentary would mainly be focused upon the way
drugs have affected a small town near Birmingham. We
were interested to find out whether or not the current drug epidemic could have spread from the
big bustling cities and infected the small surrounding areas.
Deciding the gender audience for our documentary was never really an issue, we found that there
was not much need to choose a certain gender as drug awareness is something which can be
appreciated by both male and female audiences. However, that being said we were surprised to find
that it was predominately males who would admit to drug users as opposed to females who denied
any drug use or experience.
The social class for our documentary was an issue which we had a lot of trouble with, we found it
hard pin pointing which social class
we wanted our documentary to
appeal to. The main two social
classes which we were indecisive
between were C2 AND C1 as we
felt both had merits and would be
greatly affected and benefit from
the information including within
our documentary. We eventually
opted to go with C1, the main
reason for this is because we
focused our documentary on the
way that drugs have affected the
town of Solihull, which is populated mostly with a C1 social class.