We knew this show would create a ‘goggle-box’ type reaction in every home up and down the country. So we couldn’t just run a simple poll asking about favourite songs, we had to find a way of capturing people’s preferences a little more subtly than that.
We knew we would never come up with a list that everyone agreed with (because that would be rather boring) but we did want to try and come up with a list that captured most people’s sentiments about their favourite 80’s songs. Something people could broadly agree with and have fun debating.
Working with the production company, we started with a list of the top 170 songs of the 1980s based on current streaming figures, previous sales records and previous market research polls. That way we’d capture the popularity of the time and what people are listening to right now.
We went round in circles to find a simple but effective scoring methodology to come up with a good ranking. Because it wasn’t as easy as just asking people to rank 170 songs themselves – that would take forever.
After some tense discussions we had that ‘Eye of the Tiger’ moment.
We ran a nationally representative poll of 1,200 members of the public. For each song, we gave respondents five simple options to pick from that captured their feelings about it: