Target audiences

Every piece of entertainment has a target audience. A target audience is the type of social group that the piece - for example a film - is trying to reach. An example of a target audience would be a "family film", which is a type of movie that has a non-complex plot line and happy scenes with a positive message. The target audience is family, which is classified as parents with children.

Alternatively, an R rated film (or A/18 in the U.K) would be a gory film, with high levels of violence, sexual, drug-related and explicit language. The target audience would be a "mature" audience, which means anything from young adults to an older audience.

Some types of movies have genres that make the target audience difficult to define. Target audiences are usually created through how the themes/characters and genres in a movie relate directly to a section of society. When a romance movie set in high school is made, it may have various elements of a sexual nature, in some examples even low level gore (e.g mean girls) and thus making it difficult to define the genre hence target audience, and so one must look to the characters and assume that being in a high school, the target audience would be teenagers, perhaps late-teens due to the horror content etc.

Because of this, our film, LUCID, made defining a target audience difficult, as our genre was thriller with a sub genre of action, and so we had to assume that due to the gory-horror aspect, young adults, especially males, would be the main target audience for LUCID.