AUDIENCES 10/9/12

Broadcasters will split up the mass amount of people who watch television into categories.
They do this to measure their audiences and create or alter programming to target these specific groups.

There are two main methods of categorising an audience known as demographics and psychographics.

Demographics are more statistical characteristics of a population/audience, including, age, gender, race, socioeconomic status etc.

Psychographics focus on the study of personality (psychology). This includes values, attitudes and life styles. Also known as VALS.

There are multiple establishments which categorise audiences.
The first is VALS. (http://www.strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/presurvey.shtml)
VALS stands for values, attitudes and life styles.
'VALS is a consulting and consumer research service'.
VALS uses a 40-question survey to explore/categorise audiences. Questions include, income, fashion, demographics etc.

Another establishment is BARB. (http://www.barb.co.uk/)
BARB stands for broadcaster audience research board.
'BARB is the organisation responsible for providing the official measurement of UK television audiences.'
BARB electronically measures data second by second. Television recordings or plus one are not taken into account. Data is collected from 5,100 homes.

An example of weekly viewing figures from 'BARB'. Channels with less views, perhaps have less effective idents/branding, making them less well known. 

Another organisation is ACORN CACI. (http://www.caci.co.uk/acorn-classification.aspx)
This website understands its customers due to the area you live in.
Upon registering to the website you can enter your postcode to find out about the socioeconomics of your street. Categories include wealthy achievers, urban prosperity and comfortably off.

Finally another establishment is 4CS. (http://www.4cs.yr.com/global/)
Young and Rubicam's 4Cs Values Segmentation. The 4Cs stand for Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation.

These are the Young and Rubicam lifestyle categories. The categories separate an audience by age, gender, class and interests. 

It is a service which aims to categorises people into stereotypes and categories such as; security, control, status, individuality, freedom, survival and escape. This service is based upon Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

It would be useful to use data from these websites to relate a TV ident to an audience and a channel's missions/aims.