The people that will be watching these adverts would be of a wide range. For some adverts like Hollyoaks, it's aimed at younger people and most teens. We noticed that Channel Four and E4 are aimed at a younger generation, whereas things on BBC 1 target more of a middle-aged audience, such as people who have come home from work and like to unwind in front of the TV.
A child like cartoon logo to entice the audiance.
Compared to the plain and simple adult logo.
The demographic groups watching our soap opera are likely to be groups C, D and E. We chose these groups as upper class citizens are not likely to watch soaps, as the characters are midde and lower class. This is because the majority of the population are not high in society, and using-middle class characters allows the viewer to engage with the soap and character lifestyles. Although saying this, we want our soap to appeal to a large variety of audience members, and demographic groups A and B could be included as well.
Before making our soap opera, we wanted to know who it would be aimed at. We looked at what who the target audiencemembers of some of the previous trailers were and compared them to who we would target our own at. Different trailers have different target audience. For instance, a Hollyoaks target audience is clearly young teens as the characters are young and attractive and the content would not interest someone who is middle-aged or elderly. Whereas it is the reverse for say Emmerdale, which is a soap opera aimed at a slightly older audience. By looking at these existing soaps, we have decided our target audience would be the majority of the population. Although our soap is rural and tends to lean towards the appealing to elderly viewers, our soap would include more than one generation to expand the range of our target audience. We have included story lines that would grab the attention on younger viewers, therefore concluding that our target audience will be both male and female aged 16 and upwards.
A common humourous scene in soap Hollyoaks
A serious scene included in Eastenders
Overall, the trailers we have seen were shown in between shows that aimed at a similar target audience. Therefore, our next step is to plan when it would be best to broadcast our trailer in order to ensure we are reaching our target audience. Ideally, we want to play our trailer in between popular programmes, such as existing soaps and well-known dramas and TV shows.
Would the timing and programmes soaps are shown between affect their target audience?
Obviously the timing affects what type of audience member tunes into that soap. One example is Hollyoaks, as teenagers often watch television late at night. In our post on soap trailer times, we found that a Hollyoaks advert was played after the watershed twice in one week. We also found that an Eastenders advert was aired after the news, a time when a lot of people would be watching television.
Emily Wallace
