3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback was crucial in the creation of all my products. I mainly used the social networking site Facebook for my audience feedback and also asked my fellow peers and friends what they thought of my products whilst I was in the creative process. An example of a time when I thought audience feedback was extremely beneficial was in the early stages of my front page production. I posted a picture of my front page on Facebook and asked my friends to leave constructive criticism. Below is a screenshot of a few of the comments.

Most of the comments addressed the same issues, such as: The size of the font in the story, the sparsity of the bottom right corner and the border around the story. In addition they all seemed to like my main logo and adverts. After this audience feedback I subsequently changed these issues and repeated the process.

This audience feedback suggests that my audience is active and not easily brainwashed. This goes against the hypodermic syringe theory which takes a negative view of how the media affects it's audience, suggesting that the audience is passive and easily manipulated. Clearly my audience has commented on the quality of my story and appearance of my newspaper, therefore they are taking an active interest in the production and content of the local media. My audience commented on my products in relation to 'the need to be informed' and if they were not satisfied with the story they would tell me what they disliked about it, knowing that I would alter it.

My radio ad received a massive amount of positive feedback, so I was extremely pleased that I didn't have to change anything. As for my poster, I simply showed my peers in media and asked them to rate it on a scale of 1-10. I gathered a considerable number of results and the average score for my poster was 6.5. After this I went back to the drawing board and repeated the process until my average score was raised to 8. Once this was achieved I consulted my teacher on what he thought would make my poster more effective, and made changes accordingly. This method of rating and repeating was extremely effective in refining my poster until I was happy with the end product. Surprisingly my poster was originally very complex, but through this filtering system it gradually got more and more simplified. From this I learnt that advertisements need to be simple and bold to draw attention rather than being crammed full of information.