Target audience

5. Who is the target audience and how have they been targetted in the UK?

Without having first seen the film, or indeed heard about it's phenonmenal world-wide success,
the sci-fi/fantasy genre that Avatar falls into would perhaps suggest that it would appeal mostly to teenage to middle-aged males, and sci-fi fanatics. This however is not the case. James Cameron hoped that due to the massive amount of money that went into the film, it would appeal to 'everyone' from aged 8-80. He specifically mentioned the following target groups:

• Families with young children
• Gamers/technology enthusiasts
• Sci-fi fanatics
• Older males
• Teenagers

Fox and Cameron cut the film down a lot to acheive the 12A rating they were after. This means that people of any age are entitled to go in and see it, so long as under 12 they are accompanied by an adult, broadening their target audience even further.

Avatar's sponsors, Coke Zero and LG Chocolate indicate a lot about their target audience - both are in turn targetting a teenage audience. This indicates that Fox were trying to lure in members of that target group by using these two endorsements. They set up cross-media convergences with companies such as LG (their common link being 'breakthrough' new technology), and Apple, with their Avatar iPhone App, which in turn benefit both companies.

People could use their iPhones and iPods to download and share data with their friends, check Avatar's website, watch trailers online and so on, meaning that technology users everywhere were being accessed by Avatar's massive advertisment campaign.

Avatar even took over YouTube's homepage in 15 different countries, with 'Avatar' mastheads and trailers. With thousands of millions of YouTuber's logging in everyday, this was a sure-fire, instant way of making Avatar known and talked about worldwide within as a little as a few days.

James Cameron is also a well-respected director, who in the past has directed films of high profile such as the all-time box office hit Titanic, The Terminator, and Aliens. This would automatically have meant that a buzz would be created around his next film - people would be naturally interested to see what he would produce next.