Target Audience

Target Audience of Avatar (James Cameron hopes that his target audience for this film is everyone, due to the extreme high cost of Avatar, "8 to 80")

• Older male audience
• Families with young children
• Technology enthusiasts
• Sci-Fi Buffs
• Gamers
• Teenagers (both males and females)

FOX have had to come up with a cleverly devised marketing campaign in order to reach their maximum target audience throughout the world.

20th Century Fox have been known to distribute other films such as Slumdog Millionaire, Ice Age 3, and other well-known successes. All these films have targeted a similar audience of teenagers and families, making FOX one of the best suited distributors for this film. Also, to help this film be targeted at the families and children, it has been certified with a 12A, allowing parents to take their children to see the film, even though it has a considerable amount of gun, violence and action content.

Currently in the cinemas, they have both Avatar and Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 and are soon to release Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. When I went to see Avatar, both Alvin and Percy Jackson both had their full-length trailers shown, showing the clever marketing of FOX.

Through technology-convergence, the main sponsor of Avatar was LG, a global leader and technology innovator in consumer electronics.

"As exclusive brand sponsor of the film’s world premiere in London, LG will be involved in a range of activities designed to share the excitement of the red carpet with film fans and introduce the New LG Chocolate BL40 to a wider online community. The premiere promotions begin with YouTube Super Users mingling with celebrities and crowds inside and outside the theater, conducting exclusive interviews and later providing personal reviews of the new handset.

The following day, LG and Twentieth Century Fox will bring the excitement of the global premiere to an audience of millions of internet users via YouTube’s full-screen takeover promotion. For 24 hours across 15 countries, the entire YouTube homepage will be transformed with an Avatar masthead featuring the film’s trailer."

Through the Youtube marketing, the film was able to grab the attention of the whole audience on Youtube for a whole day with their trailer. Youtube's audience consists more of technology enthusiasts and the teenagers proven suitable to place the Avatar masthead, just days before the official release of the film.

The teenage audience were also targeted through popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and more. This was a good choice of marketing as people who had already seen the film could become a fan of the Avatar page, and whilst more and more people became fans, other Facebookers could see this happening on their Homepage and click on the link itself. On the Official Avatar page on Facebook, there are over 600,000 fans, most of them leaving their reviews and thoughts of the film through comments on the page. Looking through them, I can say that a high percentage of these were positive reviews whilst there was an odd one saying it was bad, with their reason being that it was too long.

The world premiere of Avatar which took place 8 days before the cinema release was significant in reaching the audience and informing them about this new film. The premier was shown on the BBC channel at 10pm reaching the older audience, parents and teenagers. To fit in with the theme of the blue-faced Na'vi, the premier had been aligned with a blue carpet, causing conversations between the audience who were present at the opening. This event was able to get people to start talking about the film through word of mouth which was the main point of having this premier, in London's Leicester Square.