Context:
This Week I have completed my research. This was research into what Youths Choice currently is currently producing on air and digitally and also working out what to enter for the Shine Media Awards
Research:
Since this week was all about research I have quite a lot I could write about in here. I’m going to keep this as a brief outline however to see my full work for the week please click here
I quickly discovered this week that I needed to research 3 main areas to make this project a success, the first was
Researching the Shine Awards in the first place, which consisted of me visiting their w more about the organization. This helped me to decide with my focus groups what to enter for each award in my problem-solving section. I also looked at the individual award categories and decided which awards to enter based on the current output from Youths Choice. I also asked the station manager if there was any content he particularly wanted to showcase to the judges. He only mentioned that he wanted to include the County Lines video and the Station sound for Youths Choice. I identified the categories that would suit these entries and made notes to enter these pieces for those awards.
The second main area of research I completed for this project was
Understanding the current Digital Image for Youths Choice and what other similar brands are doing. I discovered that ‘Youths Choice should have a more consistent brand in its digital content. Some logos on the youtube channel are different and with different backgrounds and hard-to-read text. Most of the thumbnails and posts on Instagram do not comply with the brand’s own guidelines with logo placement, types of logos used, background colurs, fonts, and lack of outlines. Along with this, the thumbnails don’t look clickable due to the lack of custom-done thumbnail faces etc this should be updated.’
I was able to come up with lots of these points by looking at simmialar brands such as Captial, Heart, and Greatest Hits Radio. All of which target a similar age group to Youths Choice. I’ve attached more detail into the research I completed into these brands and the websites used on the Research Page
The third and final main area of research completed was
Understanding the current on Air Image for Youths Choice.
Just like before I looked at what similar brands sounded like. I discovered that ‘Youths Choice on air currently only uses two voices for their on-air brand as well as random other old voices for production that’s not been updated. This makes the on-air image confusing when listening to it. They do however do a good job on anyone who is a presenter who doesn’t do voice-over work for the station meaning the presenters won’t be talking then hearing their voice on an advert or into break sweeper. This is definitely a good aspect that should continue though the rebrand.’
I was going to spend my time listening to similar radio stations however this proved time-consuming to hear production, I instead decided on using Soundcloud to listen just to the production. This is normally uploaded by the sound designers for these radio stations as their portfolio
Problem-Solving:
For the entries into the awards, I came across one main issue. This was me actually deciding what to enter for the Shine Awards. I’ve included a full breakdown of what I decided to enter on my research main page and my thought process for this on my Problem Solving page
Planning & Production:
As last week. We are in the early stages of the FMP I am focusing more on the foundational and paper work rather than producing content. I expect this to continue until 27/03/2023 as this i9s when I am starting my planning and production.
Practical Skills:
This week I produced the research into the companies mentioned and into Youths Choice it’s self!
Evaluation:
I completed a strong and in depth research portfolio into my chosen brand and it’s competitors I also aim to complete more market research in the next few weeks. This includes focus groups and surveys for what pieces of work to enter for the awards!