Task 6– Audience Information

It is useful for advertisers to study their audiences as they are going to be the ones who actually buy their product so they will need to know what actually interests them in to buying a specific product and use that interest and try to incorporate it in their advert.

There are four main ways of audience research

Descriptive Research
This is when the people research the audiences that you are trying to attract, such as the audience age, where they live and who they are? for example.

Analytical Research
This research allows the advertising companies to see how and why the audience become tempted to certain things. For example why was there more of an audience watching lasts weeks episode, apposed to this weeks episode.

Predictive Research
This research is when advertising companies ask 'what if' situations, for example they may ask the public you they still buy a certain product such as the iPhone, even if it changed it's name.

Tracking Research
This is generally the longest type of audience research. This method will allow the researchers to monitor changes over a long period of time, to get more of an accurate record. For example the amount of games that will get sold by a certain store over the course of the year.

Audiences can be divided into five different categories, these are:

• Standard Occupational Classification -Sometimes called Social Grade by advertising companies, and is the classification of people by their class such as middle class and working class. This is a useful grouping as the richer classes may not buy a certain tv for example, so when doing research they will not study as many, if any of this classification and focus of the average and poorer classes as they are the ones who are going to buy that tv.
• Psychographics (a common attitude) - This is the way audiences can be put into different groups via their personality, values, interests and also lifestyles. These can also be known as IAO variables by some researchers. An example may be that a man may watch the 'Football', where as a women may end up watching 'Don't Tell The Bride'. Therefore as of the male attitude is more generally to sports so they would class football as a male program and will end up targeting them, and so will their adverts.

• Geodemographics - this is the classification of where people live, it is useful to study this audience as you may only be selling this product to a certain area you will only have a study of the people who live in and around that geographic area and they are the ones who are going to buy the product.
• Age - this is the classification of people age, for example if the product you are selling is a type of alcohol, you would not have children or anyone under the age of 21 in the advert as they are not able to buy the product anyway and also it could be seen as encouraging underage drinking.
• Gender - the is the classification of splitting men and women up as they generally like different things. An example would be that women like clothes and shopping, whereas a man would generally be more into sports. Thus making it important that an advert is able to  attract both genders.

BARB (the Broadcast Audience Research Board), is a business that measures tv shows audience ratings, so that companies can see how many people are watching specific channels at certain times. These channels include the BBC Channels, itv, Channel 4, Channel 5 and more. At the moment BARB are monitoring 5,100, which around 11,500 participants, they gather this information by placing a box into the tv, and records what they watch through their indivdual remote (so they know whos watching the show). The data is then collect overnight and published at 9:30 the next morning for the tv stations and advertising industry to use.

The audience measurement panel is a group of people that have volunteered / been paid to be involved in a research of what programs are most popular. For this specific table, each 1 member of the group that watches a shown is to the equivalent to 1,000 people from all around the world. The pro's of using this measurements that it allows advertising companies to find the best time for them to show their advert. The disadvantage for this advert is that it is time consuming for the research company to gather the information and is also very costly for them to get the information, as they will have to travel to these place in order to instal the device. 

Task 5 – Methods of Research

It is important to conduct research before doing an advert as you would want to know if an advert of a similar product has been made, so that you do not make the same or similar advert to what has already been made as of copyright issues. Also you will need to do some research to see what the public wants, as they are going to be the ones that will actually buy your product.

When conducting research there are three types you can do, which are:

• audience research - Is when you target people who are an audience of something, such as people who listen to a specific radio station, a specific tv program / channel.
• market research - This is when you gather information about what consumers want / prefer and the prices they realistically want to buy them at. Also do research on their competitors product and see how well it is selling for them, to give them a rough idea of how well it will sell for you.
• production research - This is when you do research on products that are very similar to that of which you wish to make / start selling. This is useful as you will know roughly how much you would sell as you will know how other companies have done selling similar if not the same product.

The four main styles of research are: 

• Primary research - This is when the research you have performed is all your own work and is completely original and there is no other company's / person's research involved in yours. This is a good type to use as you can aim the questions to what you specifically want to know, instead of using someone else's that's just similar. The bad thing about this method is that is is very time consuming as you have to create the best questions to ask and then go out and get the feed back, it can also be costly as you will have to pay the people to go and do all of that.
• Secondary research - This is the research that is done by someone else that you have gathered, this research can also be used alongside yours to maybe prove your point even more if it matches your results. This can be a good method as it will save you a lot of time as you don't have to do the research yourself, you just have to buy the research other people have done. The bad thing about this method is that you cannot ask the questions you specifically want to know, you just have to use the questions similar that other people / companies have asked the public.
• Quantitative research - This is when all the information you have gathered involves either figures, charts or a graph. The good thing about this method is that it is easily read and compared as if it is in a graph / chart form you can see the differences as it is in an image form. The bad thing about this method is that if you miss a figure or write it out wrong, it could ruin your whole research as your going on false information.
• Qualitative research - This type of research is when you try and get peoples more personal opinion, so you can find out how they really feel. The advantage of using this style of research is that you can see how people feel about your product personally, not just generally. The disadvantage with this is that you cannot measure the answer easily as everyone thinks differently and has their own opinion so it will be really hard to find two exactly the same.