U3: Research Techniques for the creative media industries

Purpose of Research:

There are many reasons why companies do research before starting a film production. The research helps them learn, learn about their target audience, learn about what films or TV shows people want to see, learn about what people liked or disliked about a previous production. Research will help the company or production house be more successful with their product, because they will know what the demographic for the film will be and they can therefore advertise towards that demographic, which means more people will see the film and that film will be more successful.

Audience research: This is the study of the customers, finding out what they like and don’t like, learning the attitude they have toward the product. It’s important for film companies to understand their audience because it will help them make the product as good as it possibly can be

Market research: Market research is the study of products before creating a new product, what consumers want, this allows the company to discover their target market, and it can be done through surveys, interviews and questionaries’

Production Research: This research will allow you to identify what resources companies will need to make the film and whether the film would be profitable within the current market. Product Research will give companies an idea of what factors could affect the production of the film for example the cost

Market research, production research and audience research are very important in the media industry.

Types of Research used within the media industry:

There are two main types of research in the media industry, quantitative and qualitative.

Qualitative research deals more with people’s attitude and belief towards a particular production. Qualitative research is people’s opinions and cannot be summarised numerically. Qualitative research is very useful in the market research because the information is from the productions target audience.

Examples of qualitative research:

Film review- A film review is a person’s personal opinion on a film. They talk about the characters, the story, the cinematography and much more, film reviews are typically given a score out of 10. Lots of people read/watch/listen to film reviews because they want to know if that film is worth watching. There are many websites dedicated to films reviews such as IMDB (internet movie database), Rotten Tomatoes and Meta critic. There are also Youtube channels that are dedicated to film reviews like Chris Stuckmann, jeremy jahns and MovieBob.

Game review- A game review is someone’s personal opinion of a game, the reviewer will talk about the gameplay, how the game looks, how it controls, its story and its characters. Reviews for video games have a very similar format to film reviews; both are usually in-depth critiques and are given a score out of ten. People will read game reviews to see if that particular game is worth their time and money. There are lots of websites that specialise in reviews for video games for example, Gamespot, The Escapist, IGN, The Know, polygon and eurogamer. In recent years there’s been controversy surrounding some video game reviewers. This controversy comes from the fact that some reviewers are paid to say positive things about the game, even if those things are not completely true, this will make the review not useful to the researchers.

The information qualitative research gets involve a lot from why, what, where, when, who and how, these answers are given because the questions used in qualitative research are designed to

get people to say their opinions. Examples of questions asked in qualitative surveys include, “why did you like/dislike the film?”, “how did you learn about the film?”, “how/where did you see the film eg cinema or dvd?” “When did you see the film eg during or after its stay in the cinema?”, “why did you want to see the film?” As I said before surveys like this will help the film be more successful in the long run. Questions about how they heard about the film will influence the marketing campaign for the film, questions about the quality of the film and made people want to see it will influence the story of the film and questions about where they saw the film will influence the decision whether to focus more on the theatrical run or the home release.

Quantitative Research is based on numbers; Quantitative research collects numerical data which can end up as percentages and as statistics which can be displayed in various ways including, charts like a bar charts and pie charts, normal numbers, or in percentages. Quantitative research can be done in a lot of ways, for example,

Box office figures: This is the amount of money a film makes, its revenue. It is calculated by the amount of tickets sold. Websites like Box Office Mojo are useful for looking at a films revenue.

DVD Sales: This is the amount of times the DVD for a film or a TV show has been purchased. There isn’t a website dedicated to just DVD sales however websites like Amazon have a best seller’s page where you can see what the

most popular DVDS are. DVD sales are useful because researches can see what customers are interested in.

Ratings: Ratings show how well or how poorly a show is preforming, if the ratings are high enough a new season may be greenlit but if the show is preforming poorly it may be cancelled.

Quantitative research is very important in the creative media industry because its helps companies learn what’s successful and what’s not. Box office figures will help them learn what genre of film is the most successful; ratings will do the same for Tv shows, statistics on how people view their product will help them decide what to focus on when it comes to a home release.

Overall, quantitative research and qualitative research are very important within the creative media industry, they help production companies make better decisions regarding their product which will lead to that product making more money and being more successful.

Methods and sources for research:

Primary research: This is research is a type of research that companies would go out and collect themselves. This is done with surveys, observations, focus groups and interviews.

Secondary Research: This is when companies existing research done by other people. The decision to use secondary research may come from the fact that they want to save time and money. Secondary research can be done by using books, newspapers, the internet, forums, archives and photo libraries.

Examples from my working portfolio 2015-2016

I have done a lot of research for my social action assignment. For my social action project I decided to do Age Concern and I had to create a pitch to the class on the organisation. It was for this pitch that I did most of my research.