Seven Days

Seven Days is a new reality tv show on Channel 4 that will be running for seven weeks. Once a week it shows the lives of people who live and work in Notting Hill. Viewers can interact with the characters in the show via the 'ChatNav' section on the website. They can tell them what they think of their lives and what they think they should do about certain situations. The characters can view the ChatNav to see what people are saying about them.

The adverts shown in the first couple of episodes were chosen to attract the target audience that they expected would be watching, however the type of adverts changed in the third episode, which is possibly because they realised that the target audience differed to what they had assumed.
An advert featured in the first episode was Times Online, which is aimed at older people, possibly from London, working in the legal system. These people may also be Conservatives. Other adverts shown were Revlon mascara, which is aimed at older, middle aged women, and two car adverts aimed at posh people.
New adverts featured in the third episode were Glade and Tena Lady, which are both aimed at women. Glade is aimed at housewives and Tena Lady is aimed women aged 50+. Another advert shown was for Absolut, which is aimed at 18-40 year old drinkers. Snickers was also shown, which is aimed at working men and women.
I think this shows that the target audience they assumed would be watching was an older, posher, middle class audience, however they realised that the real target audience was mainly older women, most likely housewives.  

The show represents a very wide range of characters from different backgrounds. There are both men and women, and there is a fair age range from around 18 to 60. There are various ethnic groups, sexualities and occupations, and wealth is represented on quite a broad scale. There are more less wealthy characters than there are wealthy, but both are definitely represented. The ACORN user guide categories that are represented are mainly Urban Prosperity and Hard Pressed. There is also one Flourishing Family from the Wealthy Achievers category. The Urban Prosperity groups in the show are either affluent urban professionals with flats, prosperous young professionals with flats or student flats and cosmopolitan sharers. Groups from the Hard Pressed category are mainly single parents and pensioners with council terraces, or families and single parents in council flats. Having such a broad representation of characters means that there is more chance that individuals in the target audience can relate to one of them, and then hopefully will continue to watch the programme.



The programme has been incredibly unsuccessful and has had shocking ratings. The opening episode was watched by only 1.1million people, and this had gone down to around 600,000 by the third episode. Channel 4 have now switched Seven Days from a Wednesday to a Tuesday to try and hook the audience back in. A reason for the bad ratings may have been that there was competition on other channels on Wednesday nights at 10pm. Having looked at the tv listings, there is a very similar, but much more fake, programme showing on ITV2 at this time. The Only Way Is Essex is also broadcasting the lives of people in London and scooped up 2.5million viewers in its first episode.