Blog Post 2: Channel 4

Researching Channel 4 was a key part of my research as their company mottos and values are vital to understand in order for my advert to fit in the Channel and best use their outreach. Channel 4's website, their annual report and Wikipedia articles gave lots of information about scheduling, the TV shows that they air and other useful information.

A comparison of Channel 4 to other popular channels in the UK

Channel 4 is a public service television broadcaster launched in 1982 as a 4th accompanying channel to BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. With 11 sister channels and 5.28% of all audience share, Channel 4 is an ever-growing broadcaster striving to reach more people than ever. 

Channel 4 has a list of aims to achieve each year, as part of the public statutory remit. It consists of 15 elements including:

• Encouraging innovation and experimentation
• Provide educational content
• Reflecting the cultural diversity in the UK
• Inspiring change in people's lives
• Supporting Young People

Channel 4's annual report demonstrated its growing ambition to support diversity throughout all the content aired, not only black, asain and minority ethnic (BAME) groups, but also a rising change in the perspective of the LGBT community.

With the rising popularity of on-demand TV, Channel 4 introduced All4, a way for the viewers to watch most programmes that have aired recently, whenever they wish to watch it. This proved to be a huge success; for example, "The End of the F**** World's full boxset was released on All4, 3.1 Million users watched the series within 100 days of the programme launching. 69% of these finished the whole series on the same day.

The Great British Bake off proved to be one of the most-watched programmes this year for Channel 4, receiving an overall audience share of 54.5% of 16 to 34 year olds. Other shows that this age demographic enjoy are Gogglebox, The Simpsons and Hollyoaks; these shows all air in the evening, from 6pm onwards. The Simpsons airs almost every day at 6pm, Gogglebox airs around 9pm and The Great British Bake Off airs from 8pm; I will place my adverts before, during and after each of these shows.

Overall this research taught me about the values of Channel 4, and how I should use them to help reach more of Channel 4's audience. Shows such as Bake off and Gogglebox have a demographic that suits the 16-25 age range we need to aim so I can put my advert around these shows to maximise my reach.