Young people want brilliant content all the time #RDE16

In a Radio Days session on research, Patrick Collins, the head researcher for the BBC youth networks Radio 1 and 1Extra outlined some of the key characteristics young people aged 12-24 want from their media.
 
“Young people want brilliant content all the time…
 
“And they want control,” he said
 
Radio 1 has broadened its delivery platforms and is on the BBC’s tv player platform iPlayer, as well as on a range of video and audio platforms. Collins believes that his network’s content should be available on as many platforms as needed to push the “brilliant content” to the young audience and give them the control they crave.
 
“Radio has shifted to on demand audio and video. Control is moving away from us to places where we don’t necessarily control the ecosystem – facebook, twitter, and others, but we still have to be there,” he said.
 
The two big questions that broadcasters must tackle when they push out their content are:
 
Do people really know it is our content when we put it on some other platform?
and
Can I track it?
 
If you can solve those questions by putting logo branding and/or links in your content and pulling in analytics from those platforms, then he says it is worth pushing out your content as widely as possible.
 
From a research point of view Collins used to ask himself, ‘why don’t they come to us?’ Now he asks himself, ‘why would they come to us?’ and when he finds the answers the network implements those strategies.
 
“To answer the question ‘why would they come to us,’ we need to know their needs and how to serve them…”
 
Four key things that answer that question are:
 

  • Competence
  • Autonomy
  • Relationships
  • Pleasure

 
“Control is shifting and we need to know how to work with that, we need to shift from wanting ourselves to be in control to give more control to the young audience.”
 
 
 
In the same session, two researchers from public radio network DR in Denmark released their findings on trends in youth media consumption.
 
Tina Gretlund and Lene Heiselberg found that in their country, listening to online music services is the top audio audio activity of young people, followed by listening to broadcast radio, then online radio, podcasts, and finally rewind radio on demand.
 
With broadcast radio at number two, radio is still very important to youth, but the rapid rise of streaming music services is certainly giving the broadcaster something to think about.
 
Young people spend more than 6 hours of screen time each day in Denmark across a range of devices.
 
When asked what device they would you miss the most if they had to give up their media devices, most (61%) said they would miss their smart phone most. Radio would be missed least – ONE PERCENT said they would miss their radio. Many didn’t own an actual radio device, although many did listen to radio on other devices.
 
When asked about what media brands they would miss most, young people in Nordic countries said they would miss Youtube and Facebook most. Lesson s learnt from the research include:
 

  • Competition is global
  • Music streaming is highly popular
  • Youtube would be missed most
  • Good content is cut to individual needs
  • Social media a crucial touch point

 

 
See our other Radio Days Europe 2016 reports here.

 

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