Task 11-Proposal

GENERAL

The topic of our documentary will be mobile phone usage, and in particular whether such devices have become a luxury to modern day society. We aimed to investigate this using the exploratory mode, with a mixed documentary with an informative but informal style. We feel this is definitely most appropriate to our potential target audience, as too much of a formal style of documentary would likely turn viewers off and makes potential audiences feel more isolated. We aim for a warm and relatable feel to our documentary to appeal to more people than perhaps it would have otherwise; this will make our audiences listen to our message more than using a clinical approach similar to a David Attenborough documentary.

SCHEDULING

We have chosen to release our documentary on Channel 4, at 8 o’clock, because the channel has many documentaries aimed at the younger viewers and in general has a larger audience of young adults. Channel 4 has already had many TV documentaries which appeal to the audience of young adults such as ‘Body Shockers’, Secret life of Students’ and Sexting Teacher’, which all target a particular age range of 16 to early 20s. Channel 4 also has branch channels such as E4 and 4music, which are again aimed at young adults. The majority of E4’s programmes are aimed at teenagers/young adults and the same with the music channel ‘4music’ has chart music. which this particular target audience will listen to. We have set the time of the documentary to be at 8 o’clock as it seems like the most appropriate time as we figured out that from around 6:30-8pm there are a number of soap operas on TV such as ‘Hollyoaks’ and ‘Emmerdale’, and we thought the numbers of people watching such soaps would be quite high; this broadens the available market for our documentary, as more people will likely be available to watch than otherwise. Contrastingly, from 9-11pm, many regular TV series are featured, so people of our target audience will give their attention to them. Furthermore, this is when the watershed is, so the majority of our target audience will likely flock to programmes of a more adult nature, so we decided to settle in the middle so that we could reach as wide an audience as possible.

TARGET AUDIENCE

More specifically, we think our target audience will be in the age range of 16 to early 20s. We feel these are the people most affected by mobile phone usage and are the first generation who have grown up pretty much surrounded in such technology. We feel as a result of this that they will be more intrigued by the documentary itself than much older audiences (such as the elderly, aged sixty and above), who may feel polarized by an area they may not feel particularly familiar with; however, it is important to note that this is a stereotype and may simply be a result of media representation of the older generation. However, the point still stands that the younger generation will be most attracted to this documentary.

AUDIENCE PROFILE