Diary
15/11/2018
Today I opened up all of the survey results in a spreadsheet and went through and analyzed the results. It took me quite a while as I had over 170 responses and therefore needed to make sure the results that I talked about were representative of all of the results. I used the premade Google Forms graphs for the quantitative answers and listed the main points from the qualitative questions. Now I need to analyze three clips from Edgar Wright movies to talk about in my video essay.
Inform our own idea...
The people who watch all of these shows I have looked at are all different age groups. Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway is one of the shows with the broadest range of people watching, the reason this show is like this because of Ant & Dec and also the show has a big range of content.
The findings suggest that if we go with the Saturday evening, ITV, 7 pm as this is one of the most popular times for viewing TV as a family. At this time people will put the TV on and just watch whatever show is on. For the group, this shows us that we need to make sure that our show doesn't collide with a popular show as everyone would just watch the show. If we did have to show our show at the same time as a popular show we would have to make sure we were appealing to a different target audience.
Based on our idea we now need to research our target audience to find out what they would want from a show, we need to think of ways we can make our show different from others. We need to research what the shows we want to borrow ideas from do and how they are really successful. ​
Radio Idents
KissFm’s main target audience is 15-34 year olds, this is shown clearly through the ident through the use of voices and how upbeat it is. The ident contains upbeat music which catches the viewer, there is also a lot of voices, which have a lot of echo which makes me think of them being at a concert, they are all saying kiss or your number one radio. This creates the join between the listener and the audience enforcing the radios name in to their head. The voiceover is done in male and female voices which shows the audience that the radio is for everyone to listen to. At the end, you hear someone shout “oh yeah” which creates a slight comical effect. The ident is around five seconds which is a good time for an advert for this audience because it is short and snappy. There isn’t much information provided in this advert just the radio name and your number one radio which is done because all they want to do is enforce the radios name to the listener.
Radio 1, playing up to date music 24/7 it's most peoples place to go for free music. On their website, it says their target audience is 15-29 year olds. The up to date pop music attracts the audience. The ident is built of up of lots of different voices and lots of music in the background. The voices say “where it begins BBC radio 1” which is their sort of slogan. BBC radio 1 is repeated many times. This gets the name into the listener's mind. The upbeat nature of the ident is a clear representation of what the radio station normally plays which is upbeat pop music. The ident is 11 seconds which is short this is because they know their audience doesn’t want something long to listen to at the end of every song.
This station is slightly less popular than radio 1 but still gets a lot of listeners. According to the BBC website, the target audience for this station is all age groups over 35. This is because they play older music and discuss topics which the younger audience may not be interested in. In this ident, the female voice sings the station number followed by BBC Radio 2. When I hear the ident all I think of is older music which is what BBC Radio 2 is about. The music is a standard speed and quite upbeat. This advert is very long at 22 seconds, however this isn’t played as often.
Peer Feedback
My group which is made up of Elise, Chloe and I has been given the 10-11 show. We have decided to do a music show playing slightly older 90s music for people to listen to while they get ready for nights out.
​
Our peers liked the different elements of the show including the competition and games. They also liked the social media element and how we will be including news on social media which we feel our target audience will like to hear more than just random news segments. They said we should include more UK artists and we should do some research to our target audience about which artists they would like to hear.
​
Next we need to focus on our idea to refine each part of the show to make sure it is going to be a strong element of the show, we also need to make sure each element of the show will be gaining listeners and not sending them away.
My research needs to start with finding out information from our target audience for things like music and what things they would like from a radio station, also I want to see if I can contact some radio stations with similar target markets as they will hopefully be able to give us some useful information.
Audience Research
When I started my research I wanted to know which radio stations are the most popular. I had just assumed BBC Radio1 would be the most popular but it surprisingly isn't, however, BBC does hold the top three spots. I was very surprised to see Radio 4 is above radio one but this is because their target audience is older people who are at home more often and therefore listen to the radio a lot. The first commercial radio station on this list is Heart which is a station we would like to base our show around because they have a similar target audience and we like their style of their shows a lot.
A commercial station is a station which gains most of its money from ad revenue, examples of these are stations such as Heart, Capital and KissFM. The opposite of this is non-commercial radio stations which are paid for through the TV license which goes to the BBC, an example of this is BBC Radio 4.
Market Research
We have found two shows what are pretty similar to the show which we have planned on creating, the first is club classics on Heart and the other is dance anthems on BBC Radio 1.​
The target market for Barnfield radio is as follows:
•Its primary target audience is 15-21-year-olds, based in Bedfordshire, E, non-ethnic and gender-specific, mainstreamers/aspirers/explorers
•Secondary audience: provide some programming for younger teenagers (13-15), mainstreamers.
•Tertiary audience: provide some programming for 21-29-year-olds, aspirers/explorers.
As the target audience has been decided this has made it easier to go through and specifically find information from radio stations with similar audiences to us, I will be looking as these stations to find out information about what they do and this will be very valuable for us.
The BBC radio dance anthem show is a merge of lots of songs with some talking but not too much which is a good example of what we want to do. The show starts off with several idents the first is the generic BBC radio one and the other is one which starts off the show. Each of the idents is really upbeat which helps keep the flow of the station going. They generally follow the pattern of talk, song, song, talk, between each of the songs there was several sweeper sounds and also adverts for other BBC internal events. The music in this show was all really new and had all come out in that year, there weren't that many UK artists, which wouldn't be good for us to follow cause we need lots of UK artists. The layout of the show was really smooth and flowed really well. They also had lots of audience interaction and between songs the presenter would be reading out tweets and texts from listeners talking about their weekend plans, this is a segment we definitely want to include.
Diary
10/1/18
Today, I started off by making my survey which I sent around to my friends because they are the main target audience for my survey. I then started looking around at existing radio shows which do the same sort of thing that we do so we could see how they do things to make them work. Following this, I need to continue the research on this page by looking at another radio show, look at some more information about how the industry works and also how my survey is doing.
The next show I decided to look at was Heart's Non-Stop Club Classics which is a really good match for the sort of thing we want to create. The show starts off with a short introduction and they go straight into the music, playing a couple songs in a row followed by an ad break with a little bit of talking throughout the show between songs. I think if we did a show like this we would want a bit more talking because this show did get quite boring after sitting and listening to it for a long time. The music choice ranged a lot, one minute there was a really old song and the next would be a really new song. After working my way through different parts of the show I couldn't find any points where audience interaction had been included, we definitely want to do this because it worked so well within the BBC Radio 1 show.
In recent years radio listeners have slightly declined due to the introduction of social media and streaming services such as Spotify. To combat this problem a lot of radio stations now use social media as a way to keep traction from its audience. A really good example of this is BBC Radio 1, they have a twitter account for their main radio station which has 3 million followers, another page for the show which has 500K followers and the presenter has their own page which has 2 million followers. As they have so many pages users can follow specifically the whole station if they listen to a lot of shows, just the individual show twitter if they want information from one show only or if they just want information from the presenter they can do this. Looking at the follower numbers you can see that they aren't messing around with their social media presence. They generally use the twitter pages to promote segments of the following days show or links to listen to the previous shows when they appear online for people to listen to in case they missed the original show. The specific show twitter account is also used to post behind the scenes images and sneak peeks of what is coming up on the show, these are both reasons for them to get people to follow the account. Each of these pages has exact replicates on Facebook with a similar amount of followers, this shows that they want to be open to a wide range of audience and they need to be as open as possible because this is their main method of getting people to listen to the show and get involved.
Heart have social media pages like BBC shows, they only have the main station page and individual presenter pages. They use the social media in a similar way but because heart works on a basis of having different stations for different areas of the UK they have pages for these rather than individual show pages, which is what makes Heart different because if you follow your local Heart twitter page you will find out information which is specifically targeted at your area, this could be anything from news to information about local events. They do the same as BBC and have exact replicates of the pages on Facebook aswell.
Survey
This question was just a simple question to start the survey. As you can see from this question the gender of the people who answered was split very evenly, this is good because it means that my answers have come from both sides rather than just females answering.
Next, I asked for their age this was paramount because I need answers from my target audience because they are the people who will be listening to the show. 76.5% of people who answered the survey are aged 13-18 and our target audience is 16-22 which, all the other age groups were a lot lower which is good because less answers will have come from other people.
From this question, I wanted to make sure that what I predicted the listeners would listen to is actually what they listen to. The station's people listen to most are Radio1, Heart and Capital. This is helpful because it shows me that we need to follow what they are doing and this is what we had originally planned to do.
After this, I asked where people are when they listen to the radio the most and from this, I found out the most popular place is in the car, at work, or at home. I think when people listen to our show they will most likely be at home or on their way out for the evening, especially the audience we are targetting.
Following this, I asked them what they would expect from a show broadcasted at the same time as ours. A few people said they thought the show may contain adult humour because its after the watershed and others said they would expect non-stop songs, with ours we will have quite a few songs but we will some talking as well. We won't have any adult humour because we want the show to be as open as possible. Someone suggested listener call-ins, or this we will probably read out tweets from listeners saying what they are up to.
For the next question, I asked what the listeners would want to be included in the actual show. The most popular answers to this question are confident presenters, audience interaction and good music. We need to make sure that Elise and I have practised what we are going to say and are confident to make the show upbeat. We will create lots of tweets to read out during the show and we will host a competition through social media. With the music, we will host a vox pox to go around and find out from our target audience different songs that they like., we will do this as part of our production research.
After this, I asked which music they thought would be played in a show at this time. The replies to this was a big range of basically every genre of music so we have decided to start with newer music and move to older music. We will find out the songs from our Vox Pox.
Peer Assesment: Research
Diary
15/1/18
Over the last few days, I have continued to do more research on the radio. I have now completed two analysis of radio shows, research regarding why social media is used so much and have completed my survey write up. Following this I need to research into OFCOM and issues regarding copyright, I also need to plan and conduct a . focus group and a vox pox to select the music.
Defamation and Copyright
Defamation is when you damage the reputation of someone by making false claims. This is why in newspapers sometimes comments are placed within speechmakers which suggests they are claims rather than truthful. Copyright is when something someone has made gets copied, this could be anything from photos, videos, songs, logos and more, special permission should always be requested when using something created by someone else.
Defamation an copyright play a big part in radio because going wrong with any of these could have dangerous consequences to the radio station. Firstly in radio, the presenters have to be even more careful with what they say compared to TV because with radio all the focus is on the voices rather than whats being shown, and with the majority of Radio being live it means that they have to be so careful what the presenters say making sure that they don't say anything which could cause complaints. They have to make sure if they give opinions they are not too controversial. The rule of thumb with this is if your unsure don't say it. Radio presenters must make sure that whatever they say is true and must not make any claims which have not been proven because this is causing defamation, doing this could lead to being taken to court by the person that has had the complaints made about them. Copyright is also a vital part of radio, they need to make sure anything used in the show has got full permission from its owner to do so. This includes songs which the station must buy licenses for this is very expensive and why there aren't millions of radio stations. Also, this may include clips from the public about news stories for this the person speaking must have signed a release form. Not following these rules could lead to big fines again and being taken to court by the person who made the content.
Ofcom
Ofcom, the UK's communication regulator, is responsible for ensuring all that is broadcasted meets specific guidelines. So after studying their online document which says all the information about how the radio show should be broadcasted there is some guidelines which we need to follow:
-
Ad spots must not be included within or around the news bulletins
-
Advertisements must be clearly separate from programming
-
The radio presenter must not suggest to the audience which songs to buy
-
The station should act in an ethical way
​
I think these guidelines should be very easy to follow, we just need to make sure we follow them all. I think we should just be careful with what we include in our show and what we say, the main thing said from most websites is that we should just be careful and if we are unsure leave it out, I think that is the best advice to use.
Focus Group
With our focus group, we wanted to make sure that we didn't repeat any of the questions that we had found answers to from our survey. So we spent a bit of time picking the questions that we would use to make sure that they would be fairly valuable. The first question we asked was what type of music did they like the most, the answers from this were R&B, Rock and hip-hop. This shows that we should maybe play a range of music because everyone in the focus group was in our target audience. An interesting comment someone made was that they liked their genre of music because they had grown up with it, which makes me think we should play music which is slightly older and may make them think back to different times in their lives. I was surprised with this question, we asked what they thought was a good percentage of talking to music in the show. Everyone agreed on 50/50, so 30 minutes of music to 30 mins of everything else. I was surprised because I feel like most people would have wanted more music, this shows me that people are listening to the music for the chat as well. After this, we asked which adverts would they like to hear the most, for this everyone said that they couldn't think of any specific ones but I think for the radio show we should make the ad spots be slightly targeted to our target audience because this way the people wouldn't get fed up of the adverts if they actually were interested in what they are promoting. Following this, I asked what news stories they would be interested in, for this they said problems in society, celebs and local. As the station our show is going on will be local we will have some news stories about the local area because people who live near may find these interesting, we will also find some celebrity news that we can talk about - an idea is to use the news as a quiz and we have to guess what happens next. Next, we asked how the presenters should act in the show. From this, they said they would want the presenters to be lively and even if it's a late show they should still be passionate. They should also seem like they are enjoying themselves and have good knowledge of whatever they are talking about, these are all good tips that Elise and I will need to take on when we do our show because we don't want people to get bored. Another comment made was that we should tell the listeners facts about the artists before each song, I'm thinking we should find some facts which are less known which will make the show a bit different. Overall, I think the focus group went fairly well, however, I think we should have spent longer thinking about the questions because the focus group didn't last very long at all, we could have also thought of some follow up questions to ask after we f=had asked each question.
Diary
16/1/18
This morning we visited Global radio which is the home of several big radio stations including Heart and Capital. We went into the studio where our local breakfast and drivetime show is recorded. They spent a long time talking to us about all things radio including stats, backup plans, songs, advertising. An interesting fact they mentioned was that still, 89% of people listen to the radio which is surprising because you would think radio is losing listeners but it actually isn't. They also spent a long time talking about how they switch between the London Heart and the local heart and also how they still play local adverts depending on where you are listening to it. I was so surprised at how many backup plans they had if anything went wrong. They also spoke about how they even pick the music based on the target audience because this shows that they care so much about their audience and couldn't afford to lose the money. The main thing they said was everything was done to gain traction and get as many listeners as possible. It was a big eye-opener to go and see how the world of radio works in a real environment and talk to the people who make it happen.
Production Research
Social Awareness Topic
Behind our show, we want there to be a little message for our audience to take away, for this we thought it would be very apt to give everyone a message about being safe on a night out because the idea is that they will listen to our show as they are getting ready. I have found out that we should tell people to:
-
Carefully pick where they go to
-
Drink slowly
-
Set limits and try to stick to them
-
Eat before and while drinking
-
Safe transport home
​
We will combine this into a couple sentences and mention maybe towards the start and at the end of the show, this is just a little message that people will hopefully hear and think to be a little more careful.
Content of the show
Based on the research we have found out that the content of the show needs to be based on the target audience so much because without the audience there is no radio show. One element of the show will be the news section which will happen at some point during the show, we will collate news items which we think the target audience will be interested in the most, there's no point telling teenagers a story about pension rates changing because they don't care about that, from the research I have found that the target market would like stories which are about celebrities.
In the show we will also have a section which will be a quiz between the two presenters with the producer reading the answers, we have done it like this because the research showed us that people in our target audience aren't very likely to call into a show for a program, they have said that they would call in to tell the show what they are doing - so we will have a section where we call the audience and they talk about what they are up to.
From our research, we found out that our target audience would interact the most if they could do it all through social media, they said they would send tweets about what they are up to and enter competitions so we will do something like this and have the audience send in tweets. As the target audience said they would want a show of 50/50 talking to chat this gives us lots of talk time so we will spend a while reading the tweets, a lot of other radio stations do this as well including Heart and Radio 1. We will use a hashtag which will be created out of the shows name, as this is a really easy way for people to send in tweets for the show.
As we will be selecting our adverts we will select adverts which target our audience because we have found out that if the adverts are for things the listeners may actually buy this would mean the listeners wouldn't switch off the radio or change to another station.​
Presenting Styles
After looking online and speaking to the staff at Global Radio everyone has said the best quality a presenter needs is to be confident, nothing is worse than listening to the radio and the presenter seeming very dull and uninterested. To combat this Elise and I will need to make sure we have rehearsed what we will say and make sure that we have lots of energy because we want that to be conveyed to the audience.
Another quality of a good presenter is the ability to work under lots of pressure, this will be less key for us because our show isn't live, but in a real radio show everything could suddenly be changed, we will just need to make sure that we are switched on and making sure we are following the script and show plan.
Bibliography
To conclude...
I am very happy with how this research portfolio has gone, I have always been interested in radio but never enough to go and look at how it works. I have learnt so much from this, I can now happily talk about how a show is produced thanks to the Global radio visit and can also see how a show goes from start to finish. With this research I just wanted to find out as much as I could in the time we had, I think the research that has been completed is very broad and covers a lot of topics but that was because I had a load of different questions.
To improve this research portfolio I think we could have done a better job at the focus group because it was very short and although it gave us some answers it could have given us so much more, this could have been improved by adding extra questions and follow up questions to the answers provided.
I hadn't mentioned above but I tried to contact some radio stations including Capital and KissFM with the hope they would give me some information but unfortunately, they didn't get back to me, this could have been valuable but I think most of my questions were answered when we went to Global, the home of heart.
The trip to Global was probably the most valuable, because being in the place where they produce radio every single day gave us so much information which was so helpful. They told us so much and a lot of which will be so helpful for our show.
​
Overall, I'm happy with this, a couple improvements here and there but I think most of this research went very well!