Channel 4 launch online community for 16 to 24 year olds

Channel 4Channel 4 is to launch a new ‘real time’ online community of 16 to 24 year-olds which will provide the broadcaster and its advertising clients with spontaneous, valuable insight and a better understanding of their most engaged audience demographic.

Entitled Tribes Live it is the latest initiative from Channel 4’s on-going UK Tribes project specialising in youth research, created in collaboration with research and strategy agency, Crowd DNA.

Invitations to join Tribes Live have been sent to viewers aged 16 to 24 who are registered with Channel 4’s online database of over six million. Upon joining, members complete a questionnaire to determine which one of 25 ‘tribes’ or youth sub-cultures they fall into (e.g. Emos, Hipsters, Scene Kids), reflecting how this demographic arranges themselves in society.

Channel 4 will regularly pose questions and assign tasks to its Tribes Live online community, with the aim of collecting varied opinions from this key age group on a range of topics including media, lifestyle, brands, aspirations and current affairs. The insight gained will be of value to advertisers and agencies as there will be scope to conduct bespoke projects with the live community – and Channel 4 will gain important learnings which will help shape the broadcaster’s content.

A key component of Tribes Live will be to encourage video contributions and ‘citizen journalism’ blogging reports from community members, to feedback to Channel 4 on trends and attitudes among their friendship groups.

Sue Gray, Head of Advertising Research & Development, Channel 4 said: “Our Tribes Live initiative builds on the unique relationship Channel 4 has with young adults. Over a third of all 16-24 year olds in the UK have now registered with Channel 4 and our Tribes Live community enables us to engage a sample of these viewers and explore a broad range of issues with them in real time.

“We’re looking forward to working with agencies and advertisers by extending the use of this immediately available community to our commercial partners to give them significant insight into the entire spectrum of young adults – an often elusive demographic for traditional research.”

Tribes Live will be live across 2013 and topical results will be updated regularly and published later this year.

[Reported by Neil Lang]