Task 7

Clients and agencies need to gather information before they start to produce a new advertising campaign. They use different methods and resources to help them find out the information.

One-way companies find out TV ratings is through barb. Barb measures ratings through using panels on peoples TV’s, it shows which programs and channels they have watched over a period of time. Another resource company’s can use is the neilson panel this is allot like barb, they use set meters to find out people tv viewing habits, from finding out what a group of people watch they can then turn this into national tv ratings. Tv ratings are useful for companies as It will show geographical statistics for example more people in whales might watch come dine with we than the people in Scotland, tv companies will then know who to target their shows and adverts at. It also helps companies to know what channels to put there adverts on as they would most likely want to put them on the most popular channel. The amount of views a channel gets is than calculated in to a percentage and this will be their rating.

Program profiles measures who’s watching the programme and what sort of time and genre they fall into, this is useful for companies so that they know what channels to advertise there adverts on. Also it shows what types of people certain programmes so advertises can then target them.

A rate card is a company’s cost for something. For example itv rate card lets people know how much it will cost to advertise. The rate cards are clear to read and have most information that someone would need, for example on the itv one it shows their TV ratings so people will know how popular or not popular the channel is and how much it will roughly cost at a specific time slot. Rate cards are useful for companies as they will clearly know how much it will cost to advertise on a channel and for how much

Different companies have online information which gives free information to the public about more business aspects to the channel/company. For example on channels 4’s online information pack (channel4sales) there is a wide range information e.g airtime, partnerships, advertising, break innovations and macro maps. This helps clients or agencies clearly decide whether they would want to advertise on this specific channel.