Understand the nature and purposes of research in the creative media industries

Primary research/self-generated research

Primary research is about getting all any you want or need on your own terms. A industry might use opinion research to find out what sort fo film they should release in any part of the year.  We used questionnaires to get all our results of the marketing campaign but you can use anything from audience panels to Internet forums. I asked the question in my questionnaire "What genre do you think this film is" and them gave them a list of 8 genres and a other section. 50% of people couldn't actually get the Genre of the film from the original poster so this gave me head way on what i needed to put in the new poster.

Secondary research
Usually you can't get all the information under you own steam so that is where secondary research comes in. This research includes information that has already been documented for example in books or newspapers. Profestional reaserchers would use secondary research to see what film sucseeded and how much money it made. This way they can do the same thing over again to make a profit. The main source of secondary research i used was IMDB (international movie data base). This site can give you all the information you need about any actor film. I used the site to find the film to do my re marketing campaign on

Quantitave research
This resarch gives you information on facts and figues. It is not opinionated in any way and will just be fact. It is useful in finding out program ratings to how many sales a movie has made. I needed to find a film which made a loss so i went straight to IMDB to just try random films. I came up with a film called Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within which made one of the biggest losses in film history. The budget was $137  million but they didn't even scrape close to making a profit.

Qualitative research
Looking into this research, this is probably what made my film fail int he first place. Being pretty much the oposite to Quantitave reseach, this type looks at opinionated views on things. This can be any sort of review  to advertising campains. Looking at my movie, there wasn't any hype to the film bar game fans that already know about the Final Fantasy franchise. Looking on sites like rotten tomato told me that as soon as the film came out, the reviews were not very good. I watched the film and really enjoyed it but everyone else seemed to hate it. I believe that people took a glance at these reviews and on that basis, decided not to watch the film. This is how powerful Qualitative reasearch is.

Data Gathering agencies
One of the biggest data gathering agencys is BARB (Broadcastes audence research board). They moniter around 26 milion homes in the UK and record what people watch and when. They will make a gernaralisation on how many people watched a cirtain program and record thier findings for people to reseach later. Taking an example from their website, the most watch channel 4 program was 8 out of 10 cats. I used this to find out how popular my film was when it came out.


Audience Market Research  
Audince Market Research is where studies are done to find out what film is suited to what type of people. Doing Market Research is always important when in the media because there is no point putting out a piece of media for someone if you don't know what they want. We used this in our project to see what people wanted differently about the posters. The exercise of creating a poster would of been pointless if I hadn't of done the research into what people wanted changed

Production Research
Production Research is where you look back into the past to see what has succeeded and what has failed. A industry would use this to see if they are going to release a peice of media around the same time it failed. We used this when we looked back at the old posters and marketing campaings. We saw how they failed what we needed to do to improve them.