BARB, RAJAR and PAMCO- using them in my documentary on the menopause

BARB:

BARB is a company that researches what the population of the UK watch on the tv, they monitor the viewing behaviour, for example how much tv a father watches and what time of day, as well as what he would be watching for example Grand Tour. Other than monitoring who is watching they check what screen you are watching this on, whether this is a laptop, phone, tv or projector, also when they are watching, for example tea time and how did the content get to the screen e.g. via an app, web search and tv guide. They collect their Data either from BARB’s own panel where anyone can say what they are watching currently and the other points and they also send out devices to random homes asking people to fill out the questions on what they are watching and why.

BARB is used by the BBC, channel 4, channel 5, IPA, sky, ITV and UKTV. BARB is used by these broadcasters to get an insight as to what programmes people are watching, it also saves them money as if a programme is failing and no one is watching it, despite lots of money invested in advertising.

It will help me to develop my documentary as I can now imagine when a documentary like mine would be shown, as it is on the menopause (an adult subject). I would show it on prime time tv, as this is when most women will be home and relaxing so, a Saturday at 9 p.m. this is as the programme is not targeted towards children, as the topic is aimed at women in their 30’s to 60’s when women are most likely to go through the menopause.

RAJAR:

RAJAR stands for Radio Joint Audience Research, they are the biggest company who measure radio audiences in the UK. It is co-owned with the BBC and the radio centre. RAJAR collect important data which helps radio stations decide whether they need to change things up, like introduce a new presenter, or they need to add a new show to bring in more listeners etc… RAJAR provide certain facts like how many people are listening between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. for example, with this information radio broadcasters can decide if they are getting lower figures of people listening to the breakfast show, every morning they can get in a new presenter and mix things up a little, it is because of RAJAR that radio stations are constantly changing routines, for example, they may add a new programme in the afternoon.

RAJAR also provide average listening time for the average listeners, reach percentage, average hours per head and total hours. They also provide market trends for example at Christmas time people may be wanting Christmas songs to play on the radio and this may make a radio station more popular, for example, the radio station “Smooth Christmas”, which is a station only around at Christmas time which only plays Christmas songs.

RAJAR could possibly be useful to me and our documentary as it shows from various surveys when the busiest time on the radio is (most people listening), this would be in the morning and the evening (rush hours), during these adverts would be expensive to run but they would also be most effective as this is when most people are listening to the radio. I am learning that for a documentary on the menopause like mine, this would be the most effective time to play the production.

PAMCO:

PAMCO provides audience measurement for publisher’s data, PAMCO asks participants about their readership from a list of lifestyle and classification questions, mainly based on newspapers magazines and online news articles. This data helps publishers like The Sun and Daily Mail by giving them an insight of the data they have collected, they collect demographic data on the 35,000 participates they send their surveys out to, they collect data as to what each individual is reading and put together a picture as to what people like to read the most, this may be the stories in the newspaper or the football scores.

With this data they sell it to the publishers and they can use it to gather an insight as to what is popular in the newspapers and magazines. This is helpful and valuable information for publishers as they can replace unpopular sections in their product with a new section that would bring in more readers and initially more sales of their papers.

PAMCO could be useful for advertising our menopause documentary as it could tell me which newspaper is most read by middle-aged women and what section of the newspaper is most popular and this would be where I place my write up on the documentary.

In conclusion, BARB is the statistics for television, RAJAR for radio and PAMCO for written articles newspapers and magazines, all these services should be taken into consideration when marketing a product and if my documentary was to be shown on tv, I would research using these databases, to decide which platform would be the most effective for the documentary.