HA3 Task 6 - Audience Information

Audience Information

Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience. Things included are radio and television listening and viewing figures respectively while audience numbers from newspapers and magazines are also measured. Web traffic numbers are also increasingly being counted on websites. The term can simply mean how many are watching, but it can sometimes be more detailed by determining who is listening. This level of audience research can include more extensive information such as gender, age, ethnicity and more. The figures for audience research can determine a newspaper/TV/radio's share in its respective market and to see where it sells well and where it doesn't. Depending on the area, the media output from a company may differ greatly between its different locations within the market. Here is a BBC table compiled by BARB (see below) detailing the average weekly reach of BBC TV and the average amount of time spent watching by a user. The table contains information from between July and September 2013.

BARB

BARB (The broadcasters audience research board) provides official viewing figures for UK television audiences.It commissions specialist research companies Ipsos, MORI, Kantar Media and RSMB to collect data that represents the television viewing behaviour of over 26 million TV households in the UK. BARB gives broadcasters, advertisers and any other interested third parties a detailed breakdown of their content's performance in various areas. This information is vital in assessing how programmes, channels and advertising campaigns have performed as well as seeing how many people they will have approximately reached. Advertising companies can then look at sales figures for what they are advertising, to see if sales went up once the advert had been shown on air. If there was a relatively small amount of improvement, the justification to broadcast another advert would be small. 

In order to estimate viewing patterns across all TV households, a carefully selected panel of private homes is recruited. Each home on the panel represents approximately and on average, 5000 homes. These panel homes are drawn from a household sample that is designed by RSMB to remain representative of all television households across the UK. This means it always encompasses the full range of demographic and TV reception variations, amongst other variables, that are found across the country and in different ITV and BBC regions. The homes on the select panels will include people from many walks of life, who will represent the viewing figures of people just like them. Things monitored include age, gender, ethnicity, marital status and sexuality. This is to provide an in-depth look at each of these audiences.

In every panel household, the television viewing is monitored automatically by viewing equipment installed by Kantar Media. Included in this process is the viewing of recorded programmes that are watched withing seven days of their original broadcast; this is referred to as timeshift viewing. More than 30,000 viewing devices are monitored across the panel of 5,100 homes, who are meant to represent the a dverage viewing habits of a wider audience.Residents and guests in a panel home register their presence in a room containing a television set that is switched on, which is the BARB definition of television viewing. They then deregister when leaving the room. In this way, the meter records all viewing by every person in the household aged 4+, adding individual demographic information to the overall viewing data. This information is uploaded automatically to BARB every morning between 2am and 6am where it is processed to apply various statistical adjustments.