Advertisers always conduct audience research before they create or release an advertisement. It is important to do this so that you can get an understanding of the audience that you would wish to aim your product at, which means that doing this will give you an estimation of the times that the audience that you want to aim your product act will be watching their television and will see your advert. It will also help the company or business to understand what they would need to put into their advert so they attract the viewer's attention.
Primary research is research that is conducted by the person who needs to find it out themselves. It is research that consists of information that has been recorded from questionnaires and other sources of information that the advertisers collected by asking people what they may be watching at what times, what they are interested in and similar things.
An advantage of this kind of research is that you get to explore all previous research that was made by others and see how they conducted their research.
A disadvantage is that it takes a lot of time and you may not always get enough information.
Secondary research is research that the advertiser would use either in addition to their primary research or if they need to get information but they can't get enough primary research and so they need to use information that someone else has collected.
An advantage of using secondary research is that most, if not all of the research has already been conducted by someone else, meaning that you can simply copy or use most of it.
A disadvantage of using secondary research is that you won't know how much of it is true or made up and how they got their results.
Quantitative research is research that uses numbers or statistics. An advertiser would need to use this in order to find out what group of people watch what on their television, what time they watch it, how many times and so on.
An advantage of using quantitative research is that it gives you a lot of information on your audience and what they watch on television.
An disadvantage is that it is not always true as some information may not be updated or it can change whilst you're conducting the research.
Qualitative research is focused more on finer details such as information about where the audience live, what they do as a job, what opinions they have on certain subjects, what their motivations are etc..
An advantage of qualitative research is that all of the information that you collect will be written in detail and will have a lot of information based on one thing. For example, if the researcher needs to find information about the type of viewers that they have at the time that their advert would be on at, then they would look at them and then try to find information on what kind of people they are and so on.
A disadvantage is that you may not always find a lot of information on the thing that you need to research and it would take a long time to get all of the information.
