Society’s trust in the media is something that has steadily declined over the past few years. In fact, less than one-third of the population says they generally trust the media and its intentions. Now I know what you’re thinking, I interned for NBC News (hints this blogs focus) which would of course requires me to have partaken in this ongoing media battle. Well, part of my job was to listen to a hotline where viewers would call about their feelings towards our MSNBC programs. Now don’t get me wrong, we have our FAIR SHARE of crazies who would call everyday screaming on top of their lungs, trying to send us the perfect design to fix the oil spill. However, overall it was a great way to get feedback from the viewers.
With this being said, the last two weeks in class we have been heavily studying qualitative research, which is described as attempts to uncover information to provide a basis for future research as well as for communications insights and prompts. This includes observing what people say and do, their meaning, comprehension and progress. When I went through my textbook to learn more about the subject, I stumbled upon the previously discussed media trust issues along with how qualitative research is great way to explore media reliability. Therefore, I think it would be a great idea for NBC News to step up its game and research societies trust in the media!
With different ideas floating through my head about what types of qualitative research would best fit NBC; I decided to do a little research of my own. During the process I stumbled upon this little baby: “Universal Uses a Novel Qualitative Forecasting Technique to Predict Advertising Demand.” (make sure you then download the document) Although it was not my idea for qualitative research, I thought it would be cool to share with you a research project conducted by NBC. Basically, NBC research was created to estimate the demand for television commercial time during the upfront market. The upfront market is a brief period in late May when the television networks sell a majority of their on-air advertising inventory.
NBC developed qualitative models based on historical data to predict demand for NBCU. In addition, they collected data on advertising spending by industry, company, advertising media type (television, print, radio, billboards, etc.), broadcast network, and advertising agency, gathering this data from several sources including media intelligence. In addition, they also collected historical data on several leading economic indicators that are believed to influence advertising spending, such as employment in manufacturing industries, inventory to sales ratios, housing starts, and capacity utilization in durable and nondurable manufacturing.
Well it seems to me that NBC uses qualitative research all the time in order better their company and viewers. Maybe someone out their will read this very post and attempt my idea of investigating the current problem with media reliability! This is all I got for this week everyone, I hope you learned a little bit about qualitative research and how it applies to the media world.
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