Unit 29: Advertisement production for television

Tasks 6 and 7: Regulation and audience

Who are the ASA?

The ASA are the Advertising Standards Authority. They are a company which act as the UK's independent regulator of advertising across all of the media within the country. The types of advertisement methods covered include TV, direct marketing and the internet. The role of the company is to ensure all advertisements are honest, proper and most importantly legal. This is done by enforcing the Advertising Codes which are written by the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP), this helps protect all of the UK's consumers.

A list of all the ads ASA deal with:

• Magazine and newspaper advertisements
  
  


• Radio and TV commercials
  
  


• Television Shopping Channels
  
  


• Posters on legitimate poster site
  
  


• Leaflets and brochures
  



• Cinema commercials
  
  


• Direct mail
  
  


• Door drops and circulars (advertising posted through the letter box without your name on)
  


• Advertisements on the Internet, including banner and display ads
  


• Commercial e-mail and SMS text message ads
  
  


• Ads on CD ROMs, DVD and video, and faxes
  
  


• Sales promotions, special offers, prize draws and competitions

When it comes to dealing with complaints the ASA offer a simple service to consumer of the UK, each complaint which is logged and then assessed, with the concerning ad thoroughly investigated to see if any Advertising Codes have been broken.

Tasks 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13: Brief + Research

Task Eight: Brief

Task Nine: Primary Research, Questionnaires

My first form of research was a questionnaire, an example of quantative research. This provides easily understandable data which can be useful when translating potential audience reactions during production. I chose a ten question set tailored in order to address specific ideas I had in mind for my advert. Each candidate were given a short background introduction to my intentions, including stylistic choices, the subject, and any specific details required.

Task Nine: Primary Research (Cont)

The table below is a visual representation of my data set. The numbers following the question in the right hand side of the table (question = 3 for example) refer to how many people agreed with this view from the 10 interviewees. Only questions 1 - 5 are shown as the following five were open-ended opinion based questions.

Task Nine: Primary Research (Cont)

I selected three of my questions to re-produce into graphs, in order to create a more easily understood representation of my data.

Would you like to see subject teachers taking part in the promotion?

This graph clearly shows that 70% of the data collective would like to see teachers involved in the promotion of a department - this is a correlation that cannot be ignored. As a result, I will attempt to use some teachers in my advertisement.

Do you think the advert should include both sexes, or a preference to a certain one?

This advert was slightly more polysemic; both Male and Female has representative opinions, which would have been difficult to draw a conclusion from. Luckily however, the majority of my data sample would like to see both sexes being used, and as such, they shall both be present.

What kind of elements do you prefer to see in an advert?

This third and final data sample is the most difficult of the three to conclude a decision from; although a majority of 4 people said they would prefer comedy, it was closely followed by Romance and Action, with 3 votes apiece. Although I would usually go with the majority ruling, this would leave a significant amount of my data set disappointed. Therefore, in this case, I will attempt a coalition between Comedy and another one of the two facets, in order to not leave too many of my interviewees without what they want.

Task Ten: Interviews

I interviewed three of my classmates to see some opinions on some concepts I have for my advertisement - this is what they thought.

Task Eleven: Focus Group

In order to better understand the techniques used in advertising, we set up our own focus group to discuss the situation. The group was made up of a mixed-gender group, actually fairly balanced in terms of male to female ratio. All participants were aged between 17 and 18. The group was made up of around 30 - 40 individuals. Obviously with such a large data set, the responses will be quite varied, though hopefully the matching traits of age and gender should equalize the correlation of results to an accurate measure. Focus Groups however, are not an exact science; as with any kind of audience feedback technique, there are advantages and disadvantages. Amongst it's strengths, a good focus group allows the interviewer to get a really varied set of information from a wide span of interviewees; such data would take weeks to prepare on a one-to-one basis. Because the groups are so large, questions can afford to be wide, open ones; this can encourage debates and discussions among the group (for this reason, they are nearly always recorded). On the other hand, closed questions can be similarly utilised, and thus easier to analyse; a yes or no answer can be quickly viewed as a (for example) 90% agree/10% disagree situation.Conversely, there are several disadvantages to these groups, most of which relate to the concept of the group mentality; as with any kind of society, leaders and followers quickly emerge; those confident enough to speak their own ideas often get copied or mimicked by others in the group, maybe to avoid embarrassment or saying something stupid. People's heightened consciousness of what they are saying can often influence the data in a serious way. On another level, these leaders can often by passionate about their opinions, and thus, heated disagreements can often arise. These group dynamics often make Focus Groups sadly unreliable.

Task Twelve: Advertising Codes

As we already know, there are a set of very strict codes to adhere to in television advertising, as stated by the ASA. One of the main things I will have to be careful of in the production of my own advert will be Section 5 of these CAP Codes, Misleading Advertising.'No advertisement may directly or by implication mislead about any material fact or characteristic about a product or service'This particular code (and it's related articles) covers the areas of misleading or untruthful claims in advertising - any exaggeration of a particular characteristic, an ungrounded claim etc. The code also covers claims such as "The best in the world" - adverts must not disregard their competitors, aside from stylistic exceptions such as Carling's "Probably the best..." slogan. if and advert were indeed to mislead it's consumers, this could cause huge backlog problems - complaints, returns, as well as the complications surrounding False Advertising laws. In order to not contravene the code, I will make sure that during the scripting period, all the claims or hooks I use to attract my potential customers are easily verifiable fact; perhaps for more advanced levels of production, I could afford to be more risky, however considering the budget constraints as well as levity of the product, keeping to these codes is probably advisable. Additionally, during shooting, I will do my best to make sure that any camera angles used are not suggestive in any way.

Task 13: Programming

Another key part in the pre-production processes for advertising is deciding which kind of programme the advert will be placed in between. As my advert is a school-based advertisement, in terms of time frames, I would suggest that a correlation with children's programming would be advisable; our primary target audience are children aged 9 - 10, with the secondary being their parents - our audience ratios will be highest at this time, so either them or their parents are likely to see it the most at these times. The genre of programme I would ideally like to place in between then would be entertainment, comedy, something similar. In terms of content, children's television can be very varied, so choosing a particular genre would be difficult; in this case I would say it is not much of a critical factor. However, for example, a indigestion tablet would usually be played in between something like a crime drama - Taggart for example; as I've said, advertisers have to stereotype in order to reach the bulk of their consumers. If I could draw your attention back to the audience classification table seen in Task 6 of this Unit, I would suggest that the audience I am advertising to is very broad; I feel that Categories D through B will all need to be catered for; as we are a state school, there really isn't a particular market to suggest - working class, right through to the middle class can be found as alumni of our school. Occasionally, it may even be someone from the A category (upper class) could be found, though I would suggest that this would be very rare indeed, as much a factor of Pudsey's geographical location, as our position as a state school. The majority of families (around 95% of the local population) are between working and middle class.In terms of viewing figures, this is a really key point to consider; of the terrestrial channels (those that use advertising - the BBC is exempt here) Channel 3, or ITV, has the biggest audience reach, and thus is the most desirable of the channels. Additionally, advertising on terrestrial is far cheaper than on Sky or cable networks; the downfall of this is however, less audience viewing.

Task 14: Initial Ideas

Task 15: Treatment