Critical Approaches to Media Products

Critical Approaches to Media Products

Quantitative Audience Research

Quantitative data is numerical data. More often than not in the media industry quantitative data will be viewer statistics, taken in order to judge the success and outreach of a show/channel/company. From quantitative data you can create statistics and track the client’s growth over time. The reasoning behind using quantitative data in the industry is simple; they want to be able to measure how often certain views or opinions are held by a chosen sample group; this could refer to their viewing habits or how they would rate a certain show or network. Quantitative can give a great overview of a demographic’s opinions and is often followed up with qualitative data as to get the reasons why the demographic think a certain way.

Audience ratings are a very common form of quantitative data that is measured by the industry’s various bodies. Simply put, this is a recording of the total number of viewers/listeners tuning in to watch a certain product. An example of this might be RAJAR measuring the number of listeners for BBC1 in any given week. I’ll explain who RAJAR are shortly, but they would simply ask select groups from the public to keep a radio diary - to keep track of every show they listen to over the course of the week. They’d record who they listened to and for how long. Once the diary was returned to RAJAR they can analyse this quantitative data - this data is quantitative as it is numerically based and not opinion-based. There are alternative electronic methods of recording the amount of viewers, both hardware and software operating in a variety of manners. They are generally seen as more efficient due to the diary’s risky nature (people can forget to fill it in, can be biased, can make mistakes).

One organisation who study and record quantitative data in the media sector are known as RAJAR. RAJAR stands for “Radio Joint Audience Research” and they are responsible for measuring the audiences for radio across the UK. They are jointly owned by the BBC and the Radiocentre on behalf of the commercial sector. They study around 310 independant radio stations and they publish their results every quarter. 47,846,000 people from the UK listened to some form of UK radio every week in a study released September 2015. For reference, the total UK population (aged 15 and above) was around 53,575,000 when the study was released. This means that only 5.7 million people in the UK don’t listen to any sort of radio.

This information is important to the industry as it allows the stations to track their popularity and figure out what’s popular; allowing them to constantly be improving their content in a manner as to attract more listeners.

BARB do a similar job for television broadcasters. Their full name is the “Broadcaster’s Audience Research Board” and they provide official viewing figures for the size of television audiences across the UK. They are also known to commission companies (such as Kantar Media) to collect needed data telling the varied viewing behaviours of UK residents.

Another organisation who assist with quantitative data are ABC, or the Audit Board of Circulation. They are responsible for providing a standard of measurement across the media industry, often regarding the circulation/viewer statistics. They were founded in 1931 in response to demands from the advertising industry. They are a source of information to the industry, helping to keep/define standards of measurement and they also help verify statistics throughout the industry (often viewer statistics). They can give certification to a company or product stating that they following industry standard with their numbers (viewer statistics). Quite simply, they will often visit media producers across the UK who produce their own viewer statistics and assess if they are doing so in an honest and efficient manner. If the company is doing so in a satisfying way, ABC will give them their certification announcing that the figures are to be believed.

Qualitative Audience Research

Qualitative data is fundamentally opinion-based; unlike quantitative data, you can’t put qualitative data into statistics or graphs. This means that it is unfortunately harder to analyze, and often takes longer to perform research because of this. However, the level of detail is naturally larger than quantitative due to being given the reasoning behind a person’s decisions or habits.

For example, after finding out that listener levels have dropped for a new show on a radio station, the company might invite a group of their listeners to discuss the new show. This is known as a focus group, and focus groups are a way of conducting qualitative research in which the researcher collects their data through conversation with the subjects. This will often simply be a series of questions that are asked of the group and each person will usually respond with their own answer. It’s easy to conduct, it has a large sample size for qualitative research, the answers are quick (as opposed to waiting for questionnaires being handed back), and it is cheaper than face-to-face interviews. However, the researcher has less control over what information he gathers and sometimes the data might be hard to assess(if the answers are vague). The interviewer must have good interview skills and assembling a group may require more resources than available.

Alternatively the station might decided to conduct face-to-face interviews. Face to Face Interviews are another method of getting qualitative research through the use of one-on-one interviews. The interviewer will usually ask the subject a series of questions and the subject will answer them as best they can. This allows the interviewer to capture both verbal and nonverbal hints; if the subject’s body language shows they don’t like something despite what they might say, the interviewer can note this down and this can be analysed later. However, this style of interview is not economically efficient and the quality of data often depends on how good the interviewer is at their job. The data has to be entered manually and the small sample size makes this even more inefficient.

Finally they might decide to send out questionnaires. These are simple documents (either printed or digital) where the audience is asked to answer preset questions by the interviewing body. This is certainly a cost-efficient way of obtaining a lot of data, as you can hit upon a much larger portion of the demographic than in focus groups, for example. Questionnaires require little time to run; once they are written, the only time spent afterwards will be on collection of the results and analysis. If done digitally, this can be done even quicker. However, there are certain downfalls to questionnaires, chiefly being the lack of detail or flexibility with the questions themselves. In an interview or a focus group, the interviewer can press the interviewee for more information or ask them to elaborate on their answers. They can also adjust the questioning to the answers given. However, with a questionnaire you can’t ask for more detail on the answers given nor can you cater them to each interviewee. You also run the risk of your subjects not completing the questionnaire, leaving questions out or simply not answering truthfully and selecting answers at random.

Audience Profiling

Audience Profiling is a way of defining the audience of a certain product. This is done so that the production team can market their product effectively/efficiently and also so that they can cater their product to the audience, thus making their product more successful. There are a multitude of different factors considered in audience profiling, which I will cover in the next few paragraphs.

First up we have Socio-Economic Status. This is the social status and the monetary wealth of the audience. This could be based off the current classes in the UK (eg Working Class, Middle Class) or it could be based upon the job a person holds. Either way, this will naturally affect the product’s reception as working class people might find it easier to relate with a working class protagonist, for example.

Psychographics is simply the personality traits, the likes and dislikes each person has. This could be genre preference, could be habits like smoking or alcoholism, could be whether they consider themselves mainstream or alternative. To explain what I mean by mainstream and alternative; this refers to whether they predominantly follow popular media (the X Factor for example) or whether they’re interested in productions that are produced outside of the main industry. Another example might be Hollywood films (mainstream) compared to independent films (alternative). It is possible for someone to be part of a niche market; this is where they like a very specific genre with very specific codes and conventions.

We could also look at Geo-demographics; where it is that the audience lives. It goes without saying that Bollywood films are predominantly aimed at people from India, but sometimes the geo-demographics could affect their perception of the product. Say if you were producing a film which features a man working on a farm far in the countryside, and you hadn’t represented farming in a realistic manner or you’d cast it in a negative light, you wouldn’t expect it to do well with people from the countryside. Instead, you’d market it towards people living in an urban environment.

Age is a huge factor to be considered; the tastes each generation have will differ greatly and nostalgia is a great tool that some producers might play on in order to get more viewers from older viewers. Age should always be taken into account as you wouldn’t market a horror movie to children. You need to have a clear idea of who you’re aiming your product at.

Gender is another large factor that will play into a lot of productions; for example, a lot of soap operas are predominantly watched by women. So it goes without saying that you would adjust your marketing slightly to cater to them, and the same would go for a stereotypically male movie, like “The Expendables” for example.