AS1 Task 9 - Bibliography

This post will just be for all of the websites that I have used throughout my AS1 tasks.

The Media: An Introduction. Editors; Adam Briggs and Paul Cobley. Chapter 17 Audience Research by Ray Kent. Longman 2002 ISBN 0-582-42346-5

The Media Magazine. The English and Media Centre. Analysing Still-Image Adverts: Reading Lynx by Mark Ramey. Issue 45, September 2013. ISSN 1478-8616

The Media Magazine. The English and Media Centre. AS Coursework - Charity Adverts by Gavin Luhrs. Issue 9, February 2004.

The Media Magazine. The English and Media Centre. How I Make Things by Garth Jennings on making a TV commercial. Issue 39, February  2012. ISSN 1478-8616

The Media Student's Book 4th Edition, Chapter 9 - Advertising and Branding. Editors; Gill Branston and Roy Stafford: Routledge 2007. ISBN -0-415-37143-0

www.youtube.com

Forms of Television Advertising - http://www.slideshare.net/Lucasjwarren/different-forms-in

Styles of Television Advertising - http://www.slideshare.net/Lucasjwarren/analysing-the-style-of-adverts-26507404

TV advert regulation - http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/broadcast-codes/advert-code/ad-minutage

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/

https://www.asa.org.uk/?gclid=CjwKEAiArdG1BRCLvs_q-IObwxMSJACXbLtz1E_gCmFSIL4ty9RmDuESIDBmzBHm_zE7Nk6TW-pQLBoClGDw_wcB

Audience Information - http://www.slideshare.net/Lucasjwarren/audience-information-26730685

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.

AS1 Task 6 - Methods of Research

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.

AS1 Task 5 - Regulations of Advertisements

Regulating adverts is important because the television adverts need to be monitored to not offend anyone and to suit the majority of the general public. This means that adverts which feature extreme violence will not be aired on television as people who may have been previously traumatized will complain about the content being shown to everyone.

Regulating television adverts need to go through several processes and two British government businesses: ASA and Ofcom. They are the two main bodies that regulate adverts, if they're not the only ones, and everything goes to and through them. They need too follow strict guidelines that then allow them to rank and rate the adverts in the suitability of airing them on television and at what times.

In 2013, ASA have said on their website that they have dealt with over 31,000 complaints about adverts aired on television, and over 4000 adverts were changed or removed from television in the same year. If you visit their website ( https://www.asa.org.uk/ ) you can check the latest adverts that they have not allowed access to be advertised and it explains why.

Since the ASA regulate thousands of adverts every year, they have several people discuss and go over an advert, each saying what they think about it, what would a possibly controversial part of the advert do or make the public think and they also find anything that might be false advertising, such as the Maltesers advert where the company had said that they "help you stay slim" when in actual fact, they were high in calories per each Malteser, meaning that the company had lied to the public by using the advert which contained a slim and possibly attractive woman.

Sometimes the company may not always find that the advert is not allowed to be aired on TV straight away. Sometimes it just so happens that people see the advert on their TV and start to file in complaints, and when ASA go over them, they realize that the advert needs to stop being aired on TV and sometimes even on radios.

Ofcom is another company that regulates the adverts on television, but they also try to maintain several other things for the English public, such as that people who watch TV are not going to see "harmful or offensive material". 

There are have been a lot of adverts that have been removed for breaking the rules that were set by these advertisement regulation businesses. Some adverts broke them so blatantly that you might be wondering why they still went along with the idea.

This advert was removed 2 weeks after being aired on television. You can obviously see why. The advert was stated to have been removed because it encouraged the bullying of over-weight people.

AS1 Task 4 - Deconstructing Adverts

iPod Shuffle (25/12/05): 

My initial response to the advert is how contrasting the colours are, lime green, black and white. It's nothing special but also kind of dull.

There's not much I really like about the advert. The music is good but I don't think it fits in with the advert and how there are break dancers dancing to the music. Also, they seem to be selling the iPod by showing that its best feature is randomising the songs being played, not by its actual function: playing music with good quality, which is what they should be saying.

The audience is obviously for young people, possibly ranging from ages 16 - 25 or 30. I guessed this by linking the type of music, the colours used which is a lime green, black and white and the youth dancing energetically and breakdancing. The product is not aimed at a specific gender as both genders can be seen dancing and is aimed to give them a nice experience with sound.


iPod Shuffle (4/8/06): 

I don't like the advert. It's stereotyping blonde women by saying that they're stupid. You can clearly understand this because she tested to see if she's pregnant by using an iPod Shuffle. Then she couldn't understand if it was saying positive or negative. This could also mean that she either didn't read the packaging and didn't notice the price on the product (which is quite obvious, near $100 for a pregnancy test is stupid) or she just doesn't care. Then at the end of the advert, her husband/boyfriend says that HE's pregnant. The advert does say that it's "good for music" but the idea behind it is stupid. It doesn't try to sell it in any way that I can see.

The target audience for the product is possibly young adults, shown by the fact that they look like they are around 30 years old. No specific gender is targeted.

Ghost in The Shell:First Assault Trailer: 

The trailer makes the viewer feel as if they are going to be extremely cool and good when playing the game. This entices them to get the game and play it. It does this by creating a rhythm with the music that is playing (Imagine Dragons - Radioactive) by matching gun shots with the beat of the music.

The trailer shows the base game quite well, viewing several maps within seconds and what is possible to do in the game; deploying drones, melee executions, different weapons, graphics, colour scheme, plot.

The colours clearly show that the universe that the game is set in is in a dark and troubled one, that also encourages players to already choose a side in the game, good or bad. The overall look of the character models also makes the players want to get the game as gamers tend to want to play as a character who looks intimidating and epic. This is also done in the trailer by showing the player that they can jump through a window and blast someone else in the face.

AS1 Task 3 - Styles of Television Advertising

Humour: These adverts use humour to make the advert and the product associated with the advert stick in the viewers mind. The most successful adverts (such as the Terry Crews Old Spice adverts) tend to be really silly, fictional and exaggerated. This combination tends to make the viewer laugh and remember the advert for its silliness.

Parodic: Parodic adverts mimic something else and tend to make a bit of a joke out of it. We will sometimes relate to the adverts as we understand what it is making fun of and some people may be inclined to go and look or purchase the product they may be trying to sell.

Shock: Shocking adverts tend to shock the viewer. They show images that will be stuck in the viewers head when they will be doing something that the advert may have showed to be careful doing. The most common shock adverts, at least in England, are adverts which relate to vehicles and speeding. They normally show a person, people, friends or family driving at speeds above the limit and having to suddenly break, but due to the speed and short notice before needing to stop, the vehicle tends to end up hitting a child or a person/people. Some adverts may even add a surprise shock where the camera follows a person leaving their car to check on the injured/killed person and find that they were with their child/children. 

Surrealism: Surreal adverts tend to make the viewer watch something that is not that far away from reality that it could be real if some things were different. These adverts can often confuse the viewer as to what the advert is trying to sell to them by mixing it with other things that may distract the users attention.

Intertextuality: Intertextual adverts mix texts with texts but also merge and transform them in some way. They use the viewers previous knowledge about something in their advert and this makes them connect with the advert more.

Repetition: This method means that adverts are repeated constantly so that they get into the viewers minds and they think of the companies product first when they want to buy a product. They repeat themselves in several ways, they either constantly show their advert after every break on a TV show which will eventually annoy you if it's not good or entertaining enough, or they can either advertise themselves through magazines, newspapers, radio stations and other sources of information or entertainment.
There are many companies that advertise their products constantly, some are known as Coca Cola, Apple, English ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and many more companies and businesses.
One of the most annoying adverts that I have seen around recently is the Giffgaff "Hey You!" advert. The most annoying thing about it is the introduction because the guy's voice is just annoying. =(

Sexual theme: These adverts use sexual content (attractive women, alluring poses and clothing etc.) to entice men and women to think about a product. Lynx (or AXE in the Americas) is quite a popular one as it always features men and women in their underwear at some point being attracted to the opposite gender just because he/she sprayed or cleansed themselves with their product, which makes the viewer think that their product will make them attractive to the opposite gender.

Famous faces: These adverts use the faces (and full-view bodies) of famous people or celebrities. These adverts tend to make the viewer think that the product is of such a high standard that even famous people use it and recommend it enough to actually participate in the advert itself.