The UK’s oldest commercial broadcaster has given details of a research project that tracks the lives and behaviours of audiences every six months.
Six Up – the name is a nod to the 7 Up Granada documentary series – has recently been extended to look at global behaviours.
“We know where TV is entering and know where its been. We need to know what it feels like up and down the lounges of the UK,” ITV’s director of audiences, Neil Mortensen, told a gathering organised by research firm Ampere Analysis on Wednesday. “We’re looking for clues about how people feel, how people talk, and the signals that show us when things are going mainstream.”
Mortensen, who returned to ITV from industry research organisation Thinkbox in 2014, said when his team first went into people’s houses they found people running cables to connect their PCs to the main TV. There was often an evangelist within the family, perhaps a student, who had sent an Amazon Fire Stick home in the post. What was emerging was that viewers were taking control of the schedule – sometimes by simply pressing pause.
US and UK audiences were very much alike, though Mortensen commented that in the United States viewers found it difficult to find free-to-air content. The Swedish were ahead of the technological curve, but overall watched less television.
The research is being fed into how ITV formulates its future strategy. According to Mortensen obtaining distribution on a variety of platforms was easy, getting the content right was more difficult, but he revealed a plan to run a trial of Boxed Sets over the ITV Hub. “If we released a fantastic drama of eight episodes it wouldn’t destroy live viewing in the way some people think because it’s a different audience.”
Mortensen called for advertising within on demand to be standardised. He said within a broadcast hour viewers knew what to expect in terms of commercials, but this wasn’t the same for VOD.
