Focus group findings 20:20

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We asked these questions to two focus groups we conducted and audio recorded. The reason for having two groups is that it made each group smaller and people would feel more comfortable than being in one large group.

The group had seen three advertisements. One was a Heart FM Advert which was on around lunchtime which fits in with its target audience of middle aged women. The Capital Radio advert the three people had seen was of an evening time. The BBC Radio 1 advert was broadcast within the BBC network on an awards show.

Some similarities that all the videos had were that they all had famous figures in them, Heart focused on showing some musicians and presenters. Capital focused only on famous musicians. BBC Radio 1 only shown their presenters to shows. I think that this reflects what the station are in the figures they chose for the videos. Heart FM have some personality presenters and it would seem they want to promote this, but as they don't always have presenters that mostly speak, they have put some musicians in to the advertisement to show the style of music. Capital have recently opened up to the Midlands area, taking over Galaxy and their listeners really just want music thus their choice to have musicians in the commercial. BBC Radio 1 is quite different as this was an internal promotion, I think they will have chosen to use presenters not only because they all have personality and speak a lot on their shows but because this is in the contracts with the presenters and would mean the BBC do not have to pay any other parties for the commercial.

We asked what was/is the favourite advert of all the participants in the focus group. The majority of the group said the Fosters advert was there favourite advertisement with the australian characters taking phone calls. Some group members said the Barclay-card advert with the man on the slide making his way home from work and how his Barclay-card has helped him to get the simpler things done faster. Both of these adverts I feel would be targetted towards young adults between 18 and 28.

With the Fosters advert the group said that they wouldn't choose the product because of the advertisement, however, most group members were below the age of eighteen and wouldn't be able to buy this product under UK law and this would have been something that the producers of this advert would have in mind.

The same result was with the Barclay-card advert, group members said that the advert appealed to them if they were to make a decision because of the wireless processing the card used, but, they would not use this advert to decide on something financial like moving banks, starting a new account etc.

The radio stations that were most listened to in the group included Capital Radio (Midlands), BBC Radio 1 and Absolute Radio. Only one person chosen Absolute and Radio 1 where the rest of the group chose Radio 1.

Everybody besides one person in the group who listen to radio 1 listened for the presenters, not the music.

We asked how the group members discovered this radio station and not a single person said that they started listening to the radio station through advertisements, rather through word of mouth and pre-tuned stations picked up by default scans on devices.

The focus group taught the group a lot about how people find out about their radio stations of choice and how they are advertised to coincide with this. Something that we came across was that the televisiona dvertisements had no effct upon listeners in our focus group and that people found out about their favourite radio station through word of mouth or because the station was readily available.

From thos findings, one may think, why have a television advertisement if they are not immediately effective? Well, that question is false and television advertisements can still have a huge impact, even from our focus group findings, if they are done right! We feel that we need to promote how Academy Radio is accesible from anywhere, not just when in Park Hall Academy, as well as this we need to make sure that people will talk about the advertisement which in-turn will drive publicity towards Academy Radio.

The way we can play on the readiness of the station is to promote the listening of the web, through the Academy's Virtual learning Environment. However, this is useless if we don't establish the brand of Academy Radio and get people talking about the station. To maximize word of mouth publicity, we will need to make our advertisement go viral. If we make an advertisement that is suited to our target audience of secondary school students aged between 11 to 18 who are currently in education, then we need to make sure that the advertisement will be relevant to them and will get them all speaking about Academy Radio.

The difference between Academy Radio and the radio stations spoken about in the focus group session is that Academy radio isn't yet an established brand. We will need to make sure that we can use the Academy's image correctly and can make sure that the advertisement is branded with what Academy Radio currently has in place for branding to not alienize people.