The Nature and Purpose of research in the creative media industries

The nature and purposes of research in the creative media industries

Primary research

Primary research is research which you gather by interviewing people yourself first hand. We were going to interview people at the dog rescue centre however they were all busy to interview properly. We decided to gather our primary research by interviewing current pet owners.

Secondary Research

Secondary Research is when you use research which other people have already carried out. This sort or information can often be found online. For example, there were videos of rescue animals on YouTube and you can browse the internet for statistics and peoples’ opinions on animal rescue.

Quantitative Research

This is when you look at figures and statistics for example sales on DVDs, CDs or film ratings. We found out statistics on how many dogs/cats had been killed because they can’t find a new home. We found out that over 1000 dogs/cats were being abandoned yearly.

Qualitative research

This kind of research is made up of information which is not numerical. For example you could include people opinions on which is the most popular pet in the UK or why people like to have a pet.

Data gathering agencies

An example of a Data Gathering agency is BARB. BARB stands for Broadcasters Audience Research Board; this is basically to help you find out facts and statistics about your audience to work out when to air a show or advert.

Another example is IMDB, which stands for Internet Movie Data Base; this is a website which has information on films, TV shows, casts and actors. It holds information such as date releases, birthdays and also has random facts.

 Other agencies which I had found are; TNS and BI. TNS is a media research agency which helps companies to target their customers more effectively and BI, which stands for the Brand Institute, researches a variety of aspects including company logos, customer satisfaction and corporate image.

Purposes of research

Audience and market research

This is looking at some stats and figures; an example of this is when we created our VO5 advert and when I was presenting my pitch, I had to look at what will attract my audience and when they watch TV most. For example, for my pot noodle advert I discovered that on the 14^th of February 2016, 7.01 million people watched Coronation Street. I found this out by researching BARB figures. Another example of this is what demographic and geodemographic your audience falls in. 

Production Research

This is researching in detail the manufacture of your product. Examples of this is researching things like: How much will it cost to produce? Do you have all the resources? Do you know all the legal documents? An example of this in my work is when making our documentary we needed to work out if we could film on the premises of the dog rescue centre, and which one we wished to go and film at. We had to research into costs of travel, luckily that was the only payment we had to pay to create this as the only prop we needed was the animals. Another example of this in my work is when we made the VO5 we had to pay for the prop of the VO5 and find out where the cheapest one was which we could get. we decided in the end it was cheaper to use an old blue tub and print of the logo. In order to do this we had researched what the bottles looked like to make it realistic.