Target Audience

  In any radio drama, the audience has no means of gaining a visual understanding, obviously due to the lack of visual images. This means that the audience needs to rely solely on audio in order to gain an understanding of the radio drama. The important contributory factors that influence the audience may include lexical choices, linguistic structures, tone of voice, accent and dialect, as well as conventions such as sound effects.

 Our target audience was that of young people aged 18 - 25, much like the characters represented in the radio drama. This was done with the intention of having the target audience being able to relate to the events portrayed in the drama. In order to address the target audience, we mainly relied on lexical choices. We used very informal language, and occasionally included the odd slang word, which is stereotypically an everyday occurrence with teenagers and students. This use of language meant that young adults could easily relate to the radio drama. 

 Another way that we addressed our audience was with the decisions involved within the radio drama. All University students are faced with the challenge of decided which University to go to, and a great majority of them are faced with the choice of staying with their boyfriend/girlfriend etc. However, from the audience feedback, we decided to include another, perhaps more dramatic decision. Eventually, we decided to include a pregnancy. This helped to build suspense while at the same time creating a multi-linear narrative. This more dramatic decision would encourage a greater number of people to listen to the piece, and, as we ended the episode with a ‘cliff-hanger,’ it would encourage the audience to listen again to the next episode to find out what the eventual decisions are.