AS1 blog 7: Audience information

audience information

It's useful for advertisers to study audience because then they know what adverts to show, when to show it and is it an appropriate time to show it. Also if helps the advertisers know when the best time is to air the advert, so when the most viewers are and when most people will see the adverts.

Audiences are divided so it is easier for advertisers to determine people the same as one person in the same 'division' as them will most likely to be watching the same programme. Audiences are divided in different ways, one way is their 'social grade', so if they are upper class, middle class, lower middle class and working class. This way is to see what the different classes watches. This is useful because the different classes will most likely watch different programmes.

Another division is where they live, they take a few people living in the same area and check what they watch and then generalise it to decide what other people in the same area are watching.

The other ways the audience is divided are age and gender. It's useful to do it this way because most women and most men watch the same things so it generalises what people are watching very easily.


It is useful to identify sections of your audience because then you can determine when they watch the most TV, what genre they watch and it makes it easier to generalise your audience.


Barb
BARB stands for 'Broadcasters' Audience Research Board'. BARB are the people that measure how many people are watching a programme for the whole of the UK. They do this by putting a small box in peoples living room and when the viewers press a button it starts recording what they are watching and the data goes back to the panellists who then records that data. Another organisation like this is RSMB. RSMB are partnered with BARB and they do the same thing but with these countries: Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary and Sweden plus statistical advice on TAM panel design in the Republic of Ireland.

An audience measurement plan is when a person represents a number of people in the universe, particular country or area (e.g. London). This is useful because it makes it quicker and easier to generalise what people in a area watch and if your programme will be watched and where it will be watched.

AS1 blog 6: Methods of research

Methods of research 

There are many different types of research, one of them are audience research. Audience research is research that is taken and the people that are researched is determined on their interests, attitudes, preferences or behaviours. The groups are determined on various things like, race, gender, age, education or family income. This is useful because the film/programme producers can see whether the target audience would watch it, if the producers never done audience research they wouldn't know whether their show would be watched by their target audience.

Market research is when a business get employees to go out and do surveys, questionnaires etc. on the public. The people they ask are chosen randomly they don't look for a certain person. There are two techniques used by companies who do market research, they are qualitative or quantitive research. Qualitative research is when they get feedback that is good quality even if they have not got much feedback. Quantitive research is when they get as much feedback as quick as possible regardless if its good feedback. The pros of using market research is you can get feedback from people that may not even know what your company are which means they cant be biased or anything. The con of doing this is if you release a online survey or something like that people can lie about their answers. You will do this to see if people will buy your product or use your service and you can do it to improve your product.

Production research is research done to get information about the product and it focuses on the production of a product, how its made. The pros of this is it gives the company information about wether their product will be successful and if the characteristics of their product is suitable. For example Lynx does research and they do it by the physical aspects of someone and once they have the information they know what to do with the product.

Primary research

Primary research is when a company does their own research and doesn't use any other companies research. This will be best used for audience research because you can't use other research for a programme because every programme is different. A con of doing this is it is time consuming for the company and it takes a lot of time and money to do it.

Secondary research

Secondary research is when a company uses other research maybe from a similar company researching a similar product/service or they can use the media for research. You could use this for market research, if someone has researched a similar product or service you could use their research for your own use. This saves time and money.

quantitative research

To get large amounts data and generalise results from a sample to the population of interest. To measure the incidence of various views and opinions in a chosen sample. In other words, you get as much data as possible for your product/service. This would be used for production research because you want peoples opinion on your product, the more opinions you get the better because you can generalise everyones opinion and determine if your product would be good. 

Qualitative research 

This is used to get good quality feedback instead of lots of feedback. this is usually used with small groups of people, this would be effective for audience research because it gets quality feedback and you don't have to rush to get as much feedback as possible so people can give better feedback and you have a better insight in if your product will be a success.