An overview of some of the ways the TV industry collects audience data and the problems associated with it

1. MAC201
Audience research and industry approaches
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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
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4. • Money and metrics
• Data collection is time consuming and difficult
to obtain
• Look for technological solutions and
quantitative measures
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5. • Consider:
– Website visitors
– Radio listeners
– Television viewers
– Video game players
– Mobile phone users?
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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.
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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
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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.
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12. • Annual subscription: £7,320+
• Distributed and represented by region
• 5,100 homes fitted with device
• 26 million TV owning homes in UK
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13. • Establishment Survey
• Undertaken continuously
• 53,000 interviews per year
• Face-to-face interviews
• Methodological triangulation
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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
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17. • Ratings
• Audience share
• Reach
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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
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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
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20. • Advantages?
– =
– =
– =
• Disadvatages?
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21. • Advantages?
– Impartial (eg advertising)
– Necessary
– Mathematically robust
• Disadvatages?
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22. • Advantages?
– Impartial (eg advertising)
– Necessary
– Mathematically robust
• Disadvatages?
– Power dynamics?
– New media?
– Mathematically robust?
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23. • Nieslon, 1989
• David Sarnoff: Research
Institute, Princeton
• ‘smart sensing’
• Face identification
technology
• Eye tracking
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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
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25. • ‘shift from the analysis of what texts do
to the audience to what texts mean to
them’
– (Ruddock, 2001: 116)
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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?
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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
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28. • To gauge quality?
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29. • To gauge quality?
– Hardly
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30. • To gauge quality?
– Hardly
• Gather advertising revenue?
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31. • To gauge quality?
– Hardly
• Gather advertising revenue?
– That’s more like it
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32. • Ratings are:
– “a techno-social mechanism that produces things
routinely agreed upon and (almost) never
questioned.
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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)
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34. • Jérome Bourdon and̂
Cécile Méadel (2011)
“Inside television
audience measurement:
Deconstructing the ratings
machine”
Media Culture Society
2011 33: 791
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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???
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36. • Eye-tracking experiments
– Usability studies
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37. • Eye-tracking experiments
– Usability studies
– UX (User eXperience)
– Heatmaps
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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.
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Click-through rates are
now averaging less
than 0.1%
66% of attention on a
normal media page is
spent below the fold

40. • Emotional investment in media
• Meta-textual activity
• Two screen viewing
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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
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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…
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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
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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
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47. • http://www.save-community.com/
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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
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53. • Farscape cancellation (2003)
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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
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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”
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56. Cancellation threats
• Star Trek (1964)
• Family Guy (2002)
• Firefly (2002)
• Farscape (2003)
• Futurama (2003)
• Dollhouse (2009)
• Flashforward (2010)
• Heroes (2010)
• V (2011)
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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)
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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.
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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)
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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
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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
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