Evaluation Activity 5

Question:

How did you attract/address your audience?

To begin with I identified my target audience which is the urban type (Analysed in an earlier post).

Once I identified my target audience, I researched into other music magazines which the target audience read. In this case it was 'Vibe' magazine. I began by looking at different front covers published by the magazine:

You can see that all these magazines have only one picture of the main artist on the front cover which takes up most of the space. The artists are all shown with an attitude looking straight into the camera as if they are looking straight at the reader. and have clothes that relate to the types of genre of music they relate to which is generally a top with a chain and in some cases snapback hats.

As well as the main picture the colour of the text would relate to the target audience as it makes the text stand out and appeal to the audience. For rap magazines the most appealing colours to the urban target audience are; Red, Black, White, and Yellow.You can see that this is the case with most editions of 'Vibe' magazine.

I put these aspects into my mind when i started planing my front cover:

The feature artist in my magazine is posing as if he is bending over a little bit looking straight at the reader as if he wishes to listen to what they reader is saying which creates a connection between the reader and the front cover image. This also addresses to the reader. The artist is shown wearing clothes that relate to the urban audience such as a baseball jacket, silver curb chain, and a snapback hat which has become a frequent choice of clothing for this category of audience.

I decided to keep the colours in mind when I chose the clothing for the artist and the text when making this. I made the artist wear a red baseball jacket and a red snapback. This makes the picture stand out and catch a potential customer's eyes.

For the text i used the colours; Black, White, Red, and Grey. I used three of the colours which would appeal to the urban audience also I got the colour Grey from the sleeve of the baseball jacket. I used two different fonts in the front cover, one was called "Allstar4" and the other was "American typewriter". I used two different fonts to differentiate from the main content and the remaining content.

Other methods used to attract my audience was:

• Price- My media product was priced at £2.50 which is relatively cheap even though this is a weekly magazine which contains 60 pages. As part of my research i looked at NME magazine which was a weekly magazine priced at £2.40 containing around 70 pages. Another factor I kept in mind which considering a price was my target audience. My target audience are 14-30 year old and are mostly middle classed so i thought £2.50 was not a huge price for a weekly magazine and was affordable for my target audience.
• Content- My media product offers exclusive content which wouldn't be offered by other magazines with similar target audiences. My magazine also focuses on the upcoming artist as well as the popular artist which would inspire the youths.