Task 3: ASA and Ofcom

Regulations

·        Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)

The advertising standards authority are a public organisation, they are governmental body that regulates for all advertisements in the UK.  The agency takes action on reviewing and responding to complaints. Their responsibility is to make sure that all UK advertising is perceived in an honest, decent, truthful and legal way.  They do this so that the public are not misled and the adverts are not harmful or offensive to the public. To achieve this they have rules and regulations that advertisers and agencies have to follow and make sure that they don't break them. If an advert breaches any of the rules and regulations they will withdraw the advert and it will not be broadcasted.

The ASA have different regulations and rules for different sectors such as:

· Children -  children's advertisement cannot contain children being encouraged to enter strange places or talk to strangers or shown in hazardous situations behaving dangerously or unattended in street scenes and also children must not be made to feel that they are lacking courage, duty or loyalty if they do not buy the product. 

·        Ofcom

Ofcom are an organization who are for the benefit of the public and aren’t for a commercial purposes. Ofcom has wide-ranging powers across the television, radio, telecoms and postal sectors. It has a legal duty to represent the interests of the public and protect the public from what might be considered harmful or offensive material.  An example is the ‘Wonga’ advert. The ‘Wonga’ advert targets elderly people, as they aim elderly people as their target audience. They highlight the fact that you can get short term loans instantly when needed.

Audience Information

• Audience measurement panels

This is the measurement of how many people are in the an audience. There are two main types of different audience measurements such as television and radio, to measure these types of media you have to record how many viewers there are for television and how many listeners there are for radio. Audience measurement is put in place to help broadcasters find out what the figures are for how many viewers and listeners are, they also do this by looking at the demographic and psychographic information.

•   Ratings

Within television, there is a system called the television content rating systems. This is a system that allows broadcasters to see how popular a program is and for viewer to see how suitable a program is for children or adults. The television content rating system gathers results by using a poll. The results from the poll can be based on how good the programme is and also how many viewers the programme has. Ratings can show how many viewers watch a certain programme. This can also help with what the mass audience research as you can see what the audience are interested in for more information gathered from the poll.

•   Face to face interviews

 interviews are a primary source of research. An interview is a conversation between two or more people where questions are asked by the interviewer to stimulate facts or statements from the interviewees. Although interviews are a standard part of journalism and media reporting, the focus of this piece is on how interviews can be used as a tool for psychological research as you are able to find out information from your audience and see what exactly what your audience want, their opinions and interests.

•   Audience Research Board (BARB)

The Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB) is the organisation 
 collects audience measurement such as viewing figures in the United Kingdom. The data collected by the BARB shows how well channels, campaigners and advertisers do. The BARB collect this information by using volunteers from the public and record and tracks what they watch.

Source Information

·       Rates cards

A rate card is a document that is provided by either newspapers or another print publication.they feature an orgainisation rate for advertising. they also include information about demographics, policies, dealines and fees. 

·       Advertiser’s information packs

This is a pack that contains rate cards, publication dates and insertion dates. It is a pack that helps you to plan your own advertising, by giving you all the information needed.

Audience Classification                  

·       Standard Occupational Classification

It is a system that separates people by their occupational background. Media companies use this classification to identify the audience they are targeting towards. Majority of the audience is ABC1 grade. A corresponds to 'higher managerial and professional'. B corresponds to 'intermediate managerial and professional'. C1 corresponds to 'supervisory, clerical, junior managerial'. C2 corresponds to 'skilled manual workers'. D corresponds to 'semi-skilled and unskilled workers'. E corresponds to 'state pensioners, casual workers'. 

·       Psychographics

Psychographis is resarch about the audiences and about there beliefs, intrests and attiudes.

 ·       Geo-demographics

Geo-demographic is  research about about the audience and analyses the age, gender, class and ethnicity of the audience. Also, it considers where the audience is from for example their nationality.

bits that need doing

Television research agencies

Research agency websites  Standard Occupational Classification