2. • Research how each of the following media sectors
measure audience feedback/responses:
– Which institutional bodies conduct the research?
– How do they solicit responses?
– How frequently do they do it?
– Are there things they are overlooking or could be doing
better?
– What challenges or opportunities does digital
consumption create?
3. • Audience research gravitates towards being a
type of ‘survey’
• Like any survey, it is commissioned with a
particular objective and set of material
interests in mind
3
4. • Money and metrics
• Data collection is time consuming and difficult
to obtain
• Look for technological solutions and
quantitative measures
4
5. • Consider:
– Website visitors
– Radio listeners
– Television viewers
– Video game players
– Mobile phone users?
5
9. • Primary provider of television audience
measurement in the UK.
• Covers all channels broadcasting across all
platforms - terrestrial, satellite and cable in both
analogue and digital.
• BARB audience measurement data underpins
the trading currency for broadcasters, advertisers
and their agencies.
9
10. • Provide audience data to all parts of television
industry, as well as to advertisers and media
agencies
• Electronic meters installed in home
• Interested in audience size
• Interested in what the audience thinks of
programmes
10
11. • BARB is a non-profit making limited company,
funded by the major players:
– BBC,
– ITV,
– Channel 4,
– Five,
– BSkyB
– IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising).
– Other broadcasters and a variety of businesses,
• e.g. research specialists, publishers and advertisers also
contribute to the cost of running BARB by subscribing to the
service.
11
12. • Annual subscription: £7,320+
• Distributed and represented by region
• 5,100 homes fitted with device
• 26 million TV owning homes in UK
12
13. • Establishment Survey
• Undertaken continuously
• 53,000 interviews per year
• Face-to-face interviews
• Methodological triangulation
13
14. • ‘All panel household residents and their guests need to
register their presence when in a room with a television
set on. Each individual does this by pressing a button
allocated to them on a dedicated handset similar to a
remote control. A screen on the front of the meter confirms
that they have registered and periodically provides a
reminder as to who has registered. Whenever a panel
member leaves a room they need to de-register their
presence in a similar way. The metering system
monitors all registrations made by each individual for each
television in the home’
– http://www.barb.co.uk/about/tvMeasurement?_s=4
14
18. • Ratings
– % figure extrapolated to number of viewers
• Audience share
– Total of potential audience for timeslot
• Reach
– The amount of viewers who tuned in for a
predetermined time
18
19. • ‘Series reach isn’t readily available and needs
to be calculated from the raw data. If the
reach is high, it could mean that relatively
large numbers loyally watched all the
programmes or it could indicate that people
have tried the series and rejected it, with new
audiences coming in for each new
programme in the series’
– Stoessel, 1999: p.257
19
23. • Nieslon, 1989
• David Sarnoff: Research
Institute, Princeton
• ‘smart sensing’
• Face identification
technology
• Eye tracking
23
24. • “The reason was simple: every time the switchover
was made, the networks lost millions of dollars in
advertising revenue. This was because the diary
system worked for the networks. Diaries rely on
people's recall, so the networks scored inaccurately
high ratings while the smaller cable stations suffered.
Once meters accurately recorded what people were
actually watching, the result was always the same:
networks lost viewers and cable gained.”
– MacKenzie, 2000 on the 1980s switch to meters from diaries
24
25. • ‘shift from the analysis of what texts do
to the audience to what texts mean to
them’
– (Ruddock, 2001: 116)
25
26. • What can BARB tell us about the meanings we
attach to our consumption?
• How might other approaches to audience
research offer different data?
• What barriers are there to audience research into
media consumption?
26
27. • “the object [in this case knowledge about the
audience] does not await in limbo the order
that will free it and enable it to become
embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it
does not pre-exist itself, held back by some
obstacle at the first edges of light. It exists
under the positive conditions of a complex
group of relations”
– Foucault, 1969, The Archaeology of Knowledge
27
31. • To gauge quality?
– Hardly
• Gather advertising revenue?
– That’s more like it
31
32. • Ratings are:
– “a techno-social mechanism that produces things
routinely agreed upon and (almost) never
questioned.
32
33. • Ratings are:
– “a techno-social mechanism that produces things
routinely agreed upon and (almost) never
questioned.
– Opening this black box might provide us with
valuable insight into contemporary culture, the way
it represents its audiences, and the way legitimacy
is conferred (or not) upon specific cultural artifacts,
especially through quantification”
• (Jérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel, 2011: 792)
33
34. • Jérome Bourdon and̂
Cécile Méadel (2011)
“Inside television
audience measurement:
Deconstructing the ratings
machine”
Media Culture Society
2011 33: 791
34
35. • Consider:
– Website visitors
– Newspapers
– Advertising
– Radio listeners
– Television viewers
– Video game players
– Mobile phone users?
– Web analytics
– N.R.S
– ABC/ABCe
– RAJAR
– BARB
– Sales???
– Network usage???
35
38. • Google’s eye-tracking
experiment:
– Needs to combine what users
are actually doing and feeling
with the eye-tracking data
reports.
– Data is just data unless it is
meaningful and informative.
38
41. • Social TV: one screen good, two screens
better (Thinkbox)
• 80% of 16-34s engage in online chat when
watching TV (Thinkbox)
• Social media now driving live TV viewing
41
42. • Media consumption is more than just mere
exposure and draws on a diverse range of
social and symbolic capital.
• Consider what happens when much-loved,
but little-viewed, TV series get threatened
with cancellation…
42
43. • NBC’s Emmy Award winning US comedy set
in Greendale Community College
– Season 1 average viewers = 5.0 million
– Season 2 average viewers = 4.48 million
– Season 3 average viewers = 3.65 million
43
44. • Threat of cancellation led to a number of
meta-textual campaigns taking place across a
several social media platforms in an attempt
to save the show
44
52. • Fans are a powerless elite, structurally
situated between producers they have little
control over the ‘wider public’ whose
continued following of the show can never be
assured, but on whom the show’s survival
depends
– Tulloch, 1995: 145
52
54. • Commissioned series 4 and
5
• End of series 4 – abrupt
cancellation
• Brascape – female viewers
to send in bras to Sci Fi
Channel Executive Bonnie
Hammer
54
55. • Farscape cancellation (2003)
• http://makikosab.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_
archive.html#81859040
• Fans watching in ‘gaggles’
• Nielsen ratings
• David Kempster: “So six people somewhere
stopped watching or went somewhere else
and we’re no longer a viable show”
55
56. Cancellation threats
• Star Trek (1964)
• Family Guy (2002)
• Firefly (2002)
• Farscape (2003)
• Futurama (2003)
• Dollhouse (2009)
• Flashforward (2010)
• Heroes (2010)
• V (2011)
56
57. Cancellation threats
• Star Trek (1964)
• Family Guy (2002)
• Firefly (2002)
• Farscape (2003)
• Futurama (2003)
• Dollhouse (2009)
• Flashforward (2010)
• Heroes (2010)
• V (2011)
Resurrections
• Star Trek (1965)
• Family Guy (2005)
• Serenity (2005)
• ?
• Futurama (2010)
57
62. • Traditional industry research into audiences
was typically interested in size and scale as
part of a commercial relationship
• Not so concerned with the meanings attached
• However, new and varied approaches as well
as the contribution of real time social-media
monitoring (RTSMM) are challenging former
assumptions.
• The latter (RTSMM) is also difficult to
measure and difficult to make sense of.
62
63. • Research how each of the following media sectors
measure audience feedback/responses:
– Which institutional bodies conduct the research?
– How do they solicit responses?
– How frequently do they do it?
– Are there things they are overlooking or could be doing
better?
– What challenges or opportunities does digital
consumption create?
64. • How do ratings prove useful, both from
our position as scholars and from the
position of programmers and
advertisers?
• Think of some circumstances in which
ratings might give a misleading or
incomplete interpretation of a product’s
success (Cult TV, slow starters etc)
64
65. • You are the social media community
manager for the University of Sunderland.
You are responsible for managing the Media
Dept’s digital presence.
– Identify ways in which to increase student
engagement with extracurricular events
– How might you improve the gathering of student
feedback (both annually and continually)?
– Establish a strategy for ensuring the feedback you
receive is representative
65
66. • Given the problems facing quantitative-
based industry studies, try and identify
a methodology to gauge the response
and reactions of audiences for the
following media:
– Video games (portable and/or fixed)
– Magazines (physical and/or digital)
– Smart phones
– Tablet computer devices
66
Editor's Notes
Magazine consumption, newspapers, Cinema, radio, social media, video games
All BARB subscribers pay an annual registration fee, currently £7,320, and a quarterly subscription fee or licence appropriate to the subscriber's category of business as set out in the rate card
Let us return to some of the various media and think about how they can be researched
Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w29DrEEsqT4
Heatmaps can tell us a lot about how users of a site are reading a page
They give us an idea about where user attention lies
Sporadic dispersions point to confusing page design
We EXPECT pages to be designed in specific ways (ie we tend to read from left to right and top to bottom in the West)
See http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=968391 for details
Watch the video: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9640887.stm
Click pic for link through to web page
In February 2010, in anticipation of a review by the BBC Trust, newspaper reports suggested 6 Music might be axed.
The review stopped short of recommending closure but noted that only one in five UK residents were aware the station existed, and that it lacked presenters with credibility as music experts.
The Times claimed that Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, proposed closure as part of a bid to scale back BBC operations and allow commercial rivals more room.
A high profile campaign to oppose closure of the station attracted media attention and led to "#SaveBBC6Music" quickly becoming a trending topic on Twitter. A Facebook group set up to oppose the proposed closure gained nearly 180,000 members.
5 months later the BBC announced it would not close
By 2011 it had doubled its audience
Magazine consumption, newspapers, film, radio, social media, video games