Target Audience Research - 06.11.11

This is something that I've been putting a lot of thought into over the last few weeks, and I thought it about time to finally get a post done on the subject of the target audience of the series.

One of the problems I have with the target audience selection is the fact that I'm doing a primarily educational series about space, educational series most often being aimed at preteens or very young teens.

This is a problem for me because my series, being about space will most likely be quite confusing to that particular age group, so the difficulty I have is aiming an educational series at a slightly older audience - young teens.

There are various sources for target audience categories on the internet, but one I found with a neat little table is here: http://www.audiencesuk.org/data-and-resources/jargonbuster/A/age-group-or-age-categories

This table shows all of the categories of age groups, and the sub groups they consist of. I will be aiming my particular series between the late 'Under 15' and early '15 to 24' group:

This is the age group that I and many of my friends began to watch sci-fi series like Star Trek and Stargate etc, often this interest in sci-fi persists even later. I for example still enjoy watching programs like Star Wars: The Clone Wars despite it being primarily aimed at a younger audience. Regardless, interest in sci-fi programs like these usually begins in these age groups, which is where series such as Star Wars: The Clone Wars are aimed and where I intend to aim mine.

Now with a target audience firmly in mind, and after some discussion with various people and my tutors, we have decided that to make the plot interesting enough for people to continue watching, I should mix in some fictional story-based elements along with the facts etc.

This does also affect the presentation of the series, as I mentioned in a previous post, I had originally intended to present the series in a cartoony CG style, but given the slight bump in the target audience I decided to go with a slightly more realistic CG style (check out my initial character designs here to get an idea), which will be less patronizing to the upper end of the target audience without alienating the younger end.

Anyway, enough typing for now! Back to drawing I must go.