Research Questions Knowledge Check 1 Knowledge check 1 1. The two main forms of research undertaken by media industries are Market research and Production research. Market research is researching the market the product will be sold in. This comprises mostly of focus groups, patterns in audience behaviour by analysis of statistics like viewing figures. Also researching the competition in the market your production is a big part of market research. Production research is research of the production itself, researching the locations, equiptment, what knowledge and talend are neccassary to create the production. In the 1990s when Guinness did market research they found that one of people’s main complaints about Guinness was the fact it took to long to pour a glass of Guinness before you could drink it. So Guinness used inversion in their campaign based on the theme and slogan ‘Good things come to those who wait’ to try counter this probably be turning this pieces of negative feedback on the product being advertised into a positive selling point. A lot of advertising companies will own research companies that operate separate from the conglomerate owning them, but will do research for them. This is a form of vertical integration that I think works well because it means if one part of the corporation fails then the whole corporation doesn’t collapse like a house of cards. 2. ABC- Audit Bureau of Circulation is a forum for the worlds leading newspaper and magazine publishers. It also maintains a database that provides newspapers with verified readership and audience demographics, It’s essential information for big newspapers and magazine publishers so they can identify their target audience and find what they like, through patterns taken from the data provided by the ABC or by reading reports on the database. It also provides an audit for newspaper and magazine companies by examining and verifying their records to assure companies their circulation results are accurate. It’s a third party independent company funded by fees paid to them by advertising agents, advertisers and publishers by paying for an audit or by paying a membership fee to the database so they can access to the reports and data. There are varying membership fees depending on the detail of resources you want to have access to. Their clients include some of the biggest advertisers in the world such as L,OREAL. I like the ABC because it provides a multitude of services all in one place that are all very important to advertising. It conducts research by the member publishers compute it’s net paid sales which when received by the ABC are checked by a firm of chartered accountants approved by the ABC. The bureau issues certificated every six months to the publisher who’s circulation figures comply with these rules set out by the ABC. An example of a fact or figure collected by the ABC is that in April The Mirror Group Digital saw a 30 increase in traffic while the Metro expirences a 25 increase in traffic for a second month running. The Mirror Group Digital and the Metro can look at this information and know they’re doing a good job while Competitors can now look at this
information and think about how they could make their product more like one of these two products in order to mirror their success. BARB- Broadcaster Audience Research Board compiles ratings and audience measurements of UK television audiences. It’s owned by TV companies like BSKYB, ITV, Channel 5, Channel 4 and the institute of practitioners in advertising. It commissions other specialist companies such as RSMB to undertake the audience measurement on their behalf. The individual viewing figures are received through black boxes connected to the TV’s of households all across the country so they can get more of a reliable representation of the UK’s viewing habits, rather than concentrate it just on a town like London and get limited results because people in London will probably lead more mainstream lives than people in more rural areas of the UK so will watch more mainstream programing as a result. It also interviews 53,000 people from all over the UK to get qualitative research and that also informs the selection of the panel homes [homes that are included in the data.] BARB is good because it gets a broad range of results geographically but they only interview 53,000 people and panel homes only represent a 5000th of the UK, so their results are still very limited and have to be hugely scaled up to represent a nation’s viewing. Furthermore results could be in accurate because the box connected to the TV records TV viewing after 5 minutes so people who watch a program and somepeople just have the last 5 or 10 minutes of a program so they don’t miss the proceding program on the schedule. Some people not have something to do after the program finishes which momentarily draws them away from the TV however they won’t always turn the TV off but rather leave it on the chanel it’s on if it’s only a quick task that takes no more than 5 or ten minutes such as doing the washing up. Then when the person returns they might change the channel to the program they actualy want to watch. So just because a program has a high viewership it doesn’t always mean that the program it’s self is what is drawing the audience in. Furthermore some people might have the TV on in the background and do be something else while it’s on such as talking to friends or family and therefore not really paying attention to the TV. For example BARB records that the most watched program on BBC 1 in the week from the 09/01/12 to 15/01/12 was Eastenders however there is no way knowing how many of the 9,987,000 people were actually watching the program or just happened to have it on. NRS- National Readership Survey provides primary, qualitative and quantitative research for print advertising in the UK. It a very reliable, accurate source of research because it gets a wide varied sample from different ages 15+, genders, classes and ethnicities. It does this by only interviewing people they selected based on information in the output of areas as defined by the census to get an accurate sample and they also weigh up results too make sure there’s an equal distribution of social classes, ages, etc. It has a 52% response rate. It makes a point of not using Internet panels because they are not representative enough of the
UK population due to the difference in response from most heavy Internet users and most non-Internet users. Some Internet panels such as YouGov ask NRS to do weighing of responses for them. I think NRS are careful not to bias their results and get responses from a diverse range of people but a 52% response rate suggests that the quantity involved in the sample isn’t great, it’s also data only about sales of publications and although 1 person in a household might purchase the newspaper the whole household may read it and this isn’t acknowledges in the survey. So it’s not an accurate portrayal of how many people actually read a publication. For example the NRS results show that 2,296,000 men buy the Daily Telegraph Newspaper from April 2012 to March 2013. However we don’t know how many people that the purchasers of the newspaper actually pass the newspaper onto someone else they know so these figures that measure how many news papers are purchased don’t accurate measure the actual readership a publication receives. Furthermore the fact that this survey only gets a 52% response rate means that like the BARB viewing figures this research doesn’t accurately represent a nation as the figures have to be hugely scaled up to represent the UK. These assumsions drawn out of scaling up the figures won’t be accurate because people of the same demographic or physcographic have different tastes. RAJAR- Radio Audience Joint Audience Response are in charge of measuring radio audiences in the UK. It’s owned by RadioCentre a trade body representing commercial radio stations in the UK and the BBC. They contract Ipsos – MORI for fieldwork and reporting and RSMB for research in weighting and sample design. An Individual radio station carries out surveys either once every 3, 6 or 12 months. The results are provided in the as press releases, aggregated reports and special analyses. An example of these results is that quarterly [over 3 months] BBC reaches 11,665,000 people which is a 22% reach of the population of the UK. RAJAR collects their data for their audience figures by handing out a seven day paper diary to every adult aged over 15 or child aged between 10 and 14 in the household selected which the indivudal is asked to complete himself and then at the end of the week the diary is handed back to the interviewer for RAJAR. A problem with this method of data collection is that there is no way of making sure the indivuals feeling in the diary are being completely honest short of spying on them 24 hours a day. Th indivduals filling out the diary might not have listened to any radio that week because they’ve been preoccupied with other things and may write that they have been listening to radio that week in the diary because they feel they are wasting RAJAR’s time. Furthermore that week could be an abnormally busy week for the indivuals and may not repsent their average radio listening habits. The same issue that occurs with BARB’s and the NRS’s data collection in regards to scaling up results occurs here. For example they represent the listenership of 8 to 12 million people by taking a reporting sample of 1900 people. RAJAR are therefore also not getting an accurate representation of the nations listening habits by basing these results on the listening habits of a few because even though people may share a georgraphic location or
maybe part of the same physcographic or demographic their tastes aren’t guaranteed to be the same. 3. Media audiences can be segmented into class, age, race gender, ethnicity and location. Some media products are explicitly targeted at a particular age like children’s programs like Teletubbies or whole TV channels like Cbeebies. Some programs like cooking programs will be aimed implicitly at older people. The same could be said for all of the above categories. For example local news is aimed at people living in that area and it’s same for local newspapers like the Greenwhich Time. Ethnicity is connected to location but also to differences in culture that could be important, for example different cultures find different things funny or interesting so particular cultures are targeted with products that will be likely to appeal to that particular culture. For example in 1983 musical due were given their own Chas and Dave variety broadcast on ITV which was made to target to the London cockney culture as musical duo of Chas and Dave and their repotior were hugely popular amoung that auidence. Media companies like to segment their audiences like this so they narrow cast their product more at an audience who they know will like it. By segmenting the audience it gives companies a better more specific understanding of their audience so they have an increased chance of pleasing them with there production. Class is identified by the S.O.C classification A, B, C1, C2, D1, D2 and E class ranging from top to bottom on the economic class. This classification is widely used by large amounts media companies. It’s a way to avoid advertising a product at a completely unsuitable market and reducing the risks of losing money. For example it would be bad business to advertise a private education service to people on benefits. 4. It is important to advertise in the media production industry because you can get a large audience by attaching a product to a popular TV show like the Xfactor, which gets on average over 20 million viewers. This is probably why Talk Talk has done so. Also it’s a captive audience, so if you have an advert at the start and end of the ad breaks every 10 minutes on a 90 minute TV show the audience will get to see your product 18 times. Also by associating your product with a regular TV show like ‘Loose Women’ you can directly target your audience. It’s a great way to narrow cast your product. You can also tap into a particular lifestyle by, for example, advertising beer in lad’s mags. It’s also a way of avoiding risks. Another important reason is that by using product placement you can advertise your brand more subtly and get into your audience’s sub conscious. Like Nescafe being shown during ‘This Morning’. An audience who are probably off sick at home who could need a coffee. As well as this the fact TV channels and publications sell advertising space means they earn money to use to create more TV shows with high production values or to keep the cover price of their publication to down. When the News of the World lost advertising due to the phone hacking scandal they know they couldn’t rise their cover price to offset this at that particular time as companies were reluctant to be associated with that news paper at the particular time due to bad
publicity so News Corp had to close News of the World down. 5. The role of a researcher is to find out information about the product in question and it’s audience as to know how best to make or sell it or to provide content. For example a researcher might take surveys on what people like about the Ford Focus. Researchers also aid and guide the content of a product for example on the news researchers will interview sources of information and research a topic discussed on a show like Jeremy Kyle that deals with a sensitive subjects. 6. You can asses the viability of a product or project by asking questions of it like do you have access to the right equipment to make it? Do you have the right skills available and right staff or people available to make your product? And if not then can you get these things? This ties into the cost. Can you afford all of the things will need? Do you know how to make your product, or how to go about hiring other people to help make your product which also ties into whether you have the skills available or whether it’s no hard or complicated to make? Also questions like how long will it take and how much return on your investment are you excepted to receive? Viability is about how realistic something is. If a production costs a lot of money and you have a lot of money or it has the potential to make a lot of money then it’s viable, if a production costs a lot of money and you don’t have much money or there’s a chance it won’t make much money then it’s not viable. It’s the same for all the other factors determining how viable your product is. 7. A SWOT analysis is the analysis of the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats of a product or project. This is vitally important and covers market and production research. The strengths and weaknesses is analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your product to see if you can improve it and make better quality or more cost efficient and what audiences like best about your product, so if you’re making a car and a majority of your feed back says they like a car with good steering you’d prioritise the steering and spend more time developing it. Opportunities is where can you advertise your product or expand your potential customers, while threats is what is out there competing with your product over the same target audience. For example XBOX’S main threat is PlayStation. This is good because you have something external to your research to compare to and thus improve your product in a different way than just having the audience feedback. 8. Copyright is legally protecting a piece of original work so no one can steal it and pass it off as their own. Copyright is a piece of intellectual property that is granted to the creator of the work upon it’s release. Copywrite doesn’t protect the ideas themselves only how are presented and usually holds for the lifetime of the creator and a certain number of the years following the creator’s decease. This amount of time varies across the medium for example for an original written, theatrical, musical or artistic work copywrite lasts for the entiery of the creators life and an additional 70 years after the creator has died where as for a broadcast
copyright lasts 50 years after the making of that broadcast ended. It’s important to remember copyright when making a product, like a song or a TV show so you don’t encounter legal problems further down the line because when you want to use another person’s work in your work ypu have to apply for permission from the owner of the copywrite and often the owner of the copywright will ask for a suggnificantly large share of the venue generated by this new piece of work however if you use a piece of work without the copyright owners permission they could sue you for maybe an even larger amount or even refuse to allow you to use their material suggnificantly harming the production. Therefore copyrighting material like a song could be a good long-term source of income because sampling is becoming more frequently used and as I mentioned if a piece of material such as a part of a song is used by someone else the owners of the copyright are entitled to ask for a substianal share of the revenue generated by this new work. For example Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus have made millions through the sampling of their song ‘Gimme Gimme’ on Madonna’s song Hung Up over 25 years after they wrote it. Knowledge check 2 1. The four main methods of research are primary research, secondary research, qualitative research and quantitative research. Primary research is research in which you create your own research data often by asking questions to people directly such as interviews and surveys. Secondary research is interpreting or analyzing some one else’s pre published research, for example reading an interview or looking for correlations of statistics such as Saturday night viewing figures to try and get audience habits. Quantitative research is research that can be quantified into numbers, like viewing figures. Where as qualitative research is getting people’s opinions in more detail. This can be gained from conducting an interview or a focus group or receiving feedback from surveys. 2. When conducting research through the form of a questionnaire you need to take into account how it looks. It needs to look attractive so people will want to fill it in. The questionnaire should always be checked for grammar and spelling. You should always consider what information you want to gain when writing a questionnaire. All the questions should be relevant to your product. When I was creating a questionnaire on health insurance I made sure that the response to every question would at least offer me something that can inform my TV commercial production. For example one of my questions was what do you look for in health insurance, so I was guaranteed a relevant answer that would inform my BUPA advert. Should start with closed questions that give enquire about basic information, like name, age, gender, sex, so it will ease people into the questionnaire and you can weight the responses to make sure you’ve asked a diverse enough market. Closed questions can be good because the response is more likely to be of use to you, but open questions may get more honest
accurate answers. Because if for example you are creating a tick box you can’t always provide a box for every option there is, you normally end up being more vague. Also when asking a closed question you must provide an option for if the other options don’t apply to that person. For example do you have a child of the age 0 and 1 year, 1 – 2 years, 2 – 3 years … or no children at all? Also check to avoid you don’t make any mistakes that could make a question unanswerable like 1 – 2 years, 3 - 4 years because there is no option if their child is between 2 - 3 years old. 3. A focus group is a form of primary research. The focus group is made up of pre-selected individuals presumably of your target audience. The people at the focus group give their opinions on the product normally through an open discussion and sharing of ideas and their results often influence the product. Focus groups are used for all kinds of things ranging from soft drinks to government policies. Focus groups are a good way to get more specific answers from your audience and a good way to get a true answer. Focus groups are different from other forms of research because they can provide a more open relaxed environment for people to express themselves and give opinions that you wouldn’t get from a survey. Focus groups are also a good way to defend your product and guide the research so you can have more of a compromise over improvements to the product. For example if people say that the Iraq war is too recent to joke about you can ask if World War 2 is ok to joke about. But you must also remember not to get to involved and fight the focus groups decisions, or completely ignore which are mistakes I made when making a sketch show. Focus groups can be good for getting only relevant answers from your target audience as opposed to asking someone in the street who might not really care or be likely to consume the product. However focus groups are normally a small selection of people that can’t possibly represent the whole demographic you are trying to reach. 4. When considering your own secondary research you should always remember to only collect relevant information and must remember to read and analyze all of your research otherwise it would be pointless. And you must never take it at face value. You must question when it was collected, where it was collected and on what scale it was collected. For example if you want to find out what people are watching and take a look at the viewing figures from panel homes you must remember it represents a 5000th of the nation. Or if you are checking a survey to see what is consumed more in the UK TV or Radio and it’s from the 50s remember that not everyone could afford TV’s in the 1950s where as most people can now and radio isn’t as successful in comparison, so the 50s survey would be of no use. It is also important to make sure that you can securely store and organize your research so you can access it and not lose it, in case you need it, for example when making a non fictional book about the Korean war then you might need to reference your sources in the bibliography so you need to store
all the relevant information effectively. Knowledge check 3 1. The key areas a presentation of your research should cover are: • An introduction to the research in which you outline the purpose and aims of your research. • Any proposal similar forms of pre production that you make based on these results. • An explanation to the methods and techniques you have used. • The research data itself presented in a suitable form. For example quantitative data should have more of a visual representation in graphs and tables. Where as qualitative data could be given as written or verbal quotes you’ve received from what you’ve received from focus groups and interviews. • A summary of findings and any conclusions you’ve made from those findings and how they inform the product you’re producing. 2. Non verbal communication includes anything that you do in body language like hand gestures and the way you stand. It included factors like clothes, posture, and facial expressions. It’s good to wear a suit because it makes you look professional. Some people will dress up in costumes to demonstrate or represent the product they are selling like using a David Beckham look alike who would wear a football kit to represent research on football. Paralanguage is not what you say but how you say it. For example what tone you give the words, what register you deliver them in. Visual aids are anything that you might use visually to help explain or demonstrate your product like props or a slideshow. Intrapersonal communication refers to communication with in you, it includes all of the thoughts, fears and anxieties you might have about your presentation. If you can control these and try to have confidence it will improve your delivery of your presentation. Interpersonal communication is face-to-face communication between two or more people and includes vebal and non-verbal communication. For example you might do some audience partication by asking someone a question. Also when giving a presentation you also must give your presentation a strong structure introducing what your talking about at the start of the presentation so the audience no what the presentation is about, making the points you want to make and presenting the information you want to present in the main body of the presentation and you must wind up your interview at the end with a summary of the points you raised in the presentation so the audience know what you want them to focus on and what’s most important to take away from this presentation. 3. To try to make your oral presentation as good as possible try not to speak too slow or too fast, try not to speak in a pitch that is too low or too high. Try to give your presentation a good sense of structure introducing the topic at the beginning so the audience know what this
presnetaion is about, clearly making and explaining the points you wish to make in the main body of the presentation with detail and a quick less detailed summary of your presentation at the end so the audience know what’s most important to take away from the presentation.Try to not be nervous or and don’t think of what you’re going to say next while still speaking as both of these things can cause you to stutter. I had this experience when delivering my BUPA advert presentation. Don’t use too much technical language or abbreviations that the audience might not understand. Put effort into addressing your audience correctly. Classes and seminars are given on delivering presentations. 4. To make your written report look as professional as possible try to have good consistent spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Oral presentations should be like the written report but the written report can have more detail that you might have left out in the oral presentation so as to not bore the audience. You should include an introduction in which you explain the purpose and aims, an explanation of research methods and techniques you have used. The Data itself should be presented in a suitable way. You should include an explanation of what you have found and Conclusions you can make from results and any proposals you are making based on the results. It’s useful to use spell check when writing your report however spell check isn’t always correct so it could be useful to give your written report to someone to proof read it to check for spelling and grammer mistakes as well as also giving their opinion on the content it’s self.