T6 - Audience Information

Many factors determine when and where adverts are broadcast on British television.

Three key factors are:

• The most suitable time of day.
• The most appropriate program to be shown during
• the cost of advertising during a program.

BARB - (Broadcasters Audience Research Board)
BARB is a 'not for profit' company that was started in 1981 and has since set the standard for providing the industry standard television audience measurement service for broadcasters and the advertising industry. It is owned by many channels e.g. BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, BSkyB, and the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising)

The roles of the BARB include;

• providing information such as, 

1. the most watched channels and programs
2. what time most people are watching
3. the type of people who are viewing at any one time.

The type of information obtained by the BARB ^

Audience Measurement Panels/ Television Measurement Service

A television measurement service measures how many people are in an audience, and usually are individual households picked through a selection process. These are useful as it provides companies with statistics as to who is watching what program at what time.

• Pros

1. Measured second-by-second, and delivered to the contractors minute-by-minute to give most accurate records of audiences within the UK.
2. It measures data from all sectors of the UK in a widespread and unclustered selection system to have all round and fair measurements.
3. Any household can be interviewed for the service, interviews are face-to-face in order to keep up to date with any population changes, and reflect the television owning population.

• Cons

1. Only uses about 5,000 people to represent the whole television owning population.
2. Should a panel home go on holiday, they will remain part of the daily reporting panel.
3. Being part of the Panel requires the monitor to be a physical presence coupled with all household televisions.

Television ratings
You can find information from television ratings at BARB.co.uk, however the information isn't available, for free, in detail. The information requires a subscription fee and this allows for the user to obtain raw information straight from the panel homes.

This information is important as it allows a channel/advertiser to know what people are watching and where to make an advertisement, in order for it to be viewed by as many people as possible, and increase sales of the product/service.

Programme profiles/programme planner tool

The tool allows the user to search for programmes and plan your 'campaign'. They can filter the search by month, channel, genre, target audience. An advertising company may find these useful as it allows them to plan when to show an advert during a specific programme accordingly.

Audience classification
Standard Occupational Classification (Social Grade) - a common means by which job information is classified by the government in terms of their skill and skill context.
Psychographics - used in marketing purposes and uses demographic information to measure a populations attitudes, values, lifestyles, and opinions.
Geodemographics - groups people in a geographical area in terms of socioeconomic criteria.
Age - divides so they can see what age group enjoys viewing the content and they know who to aim at in the future.
Gender - divided so they can measure if a particular gender prefers different types of content, or whether or not they should aim a particular programme/advert to a certain gender.