AS1 Task 8 - Sources of Information In Advertising

You can find a lot of information on television ratings on the internet. This information helps people understand why and how trends in televisions change. Companies may use this information to create their next advert as it shows them what their advert should contain or when the advert should be aired to attract the most relevant target audience. 

Programme profiles give information on how many people watch different television programmes. They give an indicator as to what kind of advert should be aired during the programme so that they would be getting the most amount of viewers during the break. It also allows specific adverts to be aired during programmes that would relate to what people are watching, such as a hygiene product being advertised during a reality tv show, for example.


BARB stands for Broadcasters Audience Research Board. BARB was set up in 1981 to provide the television industry a way of showing a standard audience measurement service for broadcasters and for the television advertising industry. BARB is owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5, BSkyB and the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) and is a not-for-profit company. BARB commissions research companies to provide the types of services that BARB users want or need, even including audience viewing figures which are how many people view a program or advert and when. Audience measurement contracts are held by several other companies including RSMB, Ipsos, MORI and Kantar Media which was formerly known as TNS.

BARB gets its viewer information from box sets linked to the house that is participating with BARB which records what programs are viewed and what people view them when they press a specified button on a remote handset. The data is then published at roughly 9:30am the next morning which can then be used by all TV stations and by the advertising industry itself, be it for use for advertising researchers or just for people to view and record.

Program profiles are broken down sets of data that show the number of people that have viewed a programme. This is useful to an advertiser as they can gather information which can be used to dictate what they would like their advert to be like to attract a wider range or larger number of people. They can also use the information to understand what adverts work best after a certain television programme, such as a Fairy advert being used during some kind of soap programme such as Downton Abbey or something similar.

People also use "rate cards". These show how much it costs to air an advert during a programme, popular programme shown during social hours obviously cost more than unpopular programmes shown during unsocial hours. Since adverts costs quite a lot to be aired, people use several companies to find out if it was worth it. One such company or business is Guerilla Scope. It is a service that is used by people to find out how many people have viewed their advert, but for a view to count they must watch at least 10 seconds, otherwise nothing is recorded.

A lot of advertising information can be found on TV channel websites. They offer programs that give advertisers opportunities to advertise what they want, for a price but with benefits as well. On websites such as https://www.4sales.com/advertising and http://www.itvmedia.co.uk/advertising-opportunities, they give a lot of information on how it works for new advertisers, how much it costs, what it's like and how it works. They offer sponsorships, partnerships and more opportunities. All of this is useful to advertisers as they are given most, if not all of the information that they would need to advertise something. Everything can be found online if they need any more information and all of it is free.

AS1 Task 7 - Audience Information

Advertisers need to study their audiences because they receive important information on what the most effective advert would be and how the audience reacts to their advert. They use this information to sell their products or services to them better and more efficiently as they know what their audience is like and how to sell to them. There are several groups of audiences that the advertisement researchers focus on.

The first is the descriptive research part that researchers focus on and it includes the audiences that are currently being targeted, what their ages are, where they live, where they work or what they work as and so on. This research focuses on the description of the audience being targeted and their characteristics as this tells the researchers how to advertise.

Analytical research seeks to find out the answers to the 'why' and 'how' questions in audiences. The researchers find out what motivates audiences, how, why and what might have caused this.

Predictive research is where researchers consider "what if" situations such as what would happen if the advertising company were to change their name or for example the accessibility of a product. Researchers can then use a theory to their advantage to prevent something bad from happening to their company.

Tracking research is long-term research which monitors any changes to the target audience over a long period of time, for example, how have subscription season ticket sales changed over a period of time or how views may have changed between several series.


Researchers also look at several other factors such as viewer's "standard occupational classification", psychographics, geodemographics, age and gender.

Standard Occupational Classification (social grade) is what jobs the audience has, what their income is and how they get along financially. This is used to class the audience into financial groups to determine what each financial group prefers to watch.

Psychographics this is the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and
lifestyles. It studies interests, activities and opinions. It studies common interests and tries to find trends that people with the same psychographic definition tend to do.

Geodemographics is the research that is conducted on where the audience lives in certain of a country. It uses this information to look at what people in a certain region look at what.

All of this research is conducted to make sure that the company advertises to the correct people in order to get a profit out of their viewers, although this does not always happen. Advertisement researchers divide their audience into these categories so that they know what they can advertise safely without offending anyone and so that they get a wide audience. They can also use the information to learn about the audience to find out specifically what they like so they can easily be persuaded into viewing the advertised product to bring in more revenue.