TV - cyberpop!

not skipping, though maybe not watching, TV ads

March 29, 2010 By sem Leave a Comment

As consumers adopt DVRs and PVRs (and previously, VCRs) or consume our television programming online, the biggest worry from a marketing perspective is that these are technologies enabling commercial skipping. But new market research indicates that viewers are actually willing to tolerate televisual advertising, even when we are wielding technologies that give us more control over the screens in our lives.

TV commercials for online & DVR audiences

When comScore asked people who watch TV shows online on sites like Hulu, about their endurance for commercials, they found that viewers “would tolerate six to seven minutes of advertising per each hour of programming” on the web. The significance of this figure is twofold—first, 7 minutes of ads/hour is approximately double what Hulu sells now. Secondly, this figure represents about half of the ad-time we see now in the average hour of prime-time TV (nearly 14 minutes).

However it’s getting more difficult to skip commercials with trends toward product integration, program endorsement, series sponsorships and other forms of in-show brand appearances. Today audiences watching their plasmas and HDTVs are getting about 22 minutes of marketing content per hour if we add up both network commercial messages and the impossible-to-skip integrated brand appearances.

Digital escapes? advert skipping technologies in hand, yet still we watch

Even those households with digital recorders tend to watch about two-thirds of ads, says Nielsen. Although DVR/PVR devices enable timeshifting and fast-forwarding through the commercials, many viewers still opt to watch—most especially those spots that appear at the beginning and end of commercial breaks.

In Canada, where only a third of households have DVRs, market research shows that although viewers may sit through the commercial breaks (instead of fast-forwarding or channel-switching) we are not paying them any attention. Only one in five Canadians watches commercials, according to a survey by advertising agency Bensimon Byrne. So what are we doing during the programming breaks then? Screen shifting and sofa surfing! Bensimon Byrne found that Canadian eyeballs divert from big screen adverts to small screen texting and surfing on the smartphones and laptops we take with us to the living room. Multimedia, multi-channel, multi-screen, multitaskers R us.

Filed Under: advertising, television Tagged With: advertising, DVR, PVR, TiVo, TV, video, YouTube

TV/web: displacement or complementarity?

March 24, 2010 By sem 6 Comments

Two research reports getting lots of press this week, both measuring how much time people spend looking at (a) computer screens while on the web and (b) looking at TV screens watching television programming. But while Nielsen and Ipsos Reid measured the same media use habits, the spin each organization put on their findings was quite different. The result was mainstream media coverage interpreted the results oppositionally, which slightly skewed coverage of these consumer trends.

For Ipsos Reid, the headline emphasized displacement of TV by the web. For the first time ever, headlines stated, “Canadians are spending more than 18 hours a week online, compared with 16.9 hours watching television.” Although the press release indicated that time spent with each of the two screens was up YOY, the release sent reporters scurrying to find experts willing to comment about whether the report spelled the death of TV programming. The report was measuring eyeballs-on-screens, not content/program consumption, and yet the findings were widely interpreted to mean that consumers are increasingly disenchanted with and tuning out television shows—which is not the case at all. In fact we’re watching more TV than ever—including of course, on our computers.

Nielsen of course, gets this. The press release for their latest installment of the Three Screens Report emphasized the complementarity of watching TV and surfing the web using a computer—underscoring that the key trend is not displacement but simultaneous usage. Nielsen documented how “on a year-over-year basis, time spent simultaneously using these two forms of electronic media grew a significant 34.5%.” By emphasizing that our media use habits are about juggling multimedia multichannel multitasking, Nielsen’s report fits nicely into the trend of “connected cocooning.”

Interestingly (but not surprisingly), Nielsen indicated that “TV usage appears to be spilling into time spent on the internet, rather than vice versa.” That last point likely has everything to do with the limited web experience offered by connected-TVs.

Filed Under: media use, mobile, television, video Tagged With: mobile, TV

tech boom(ers)

February 16, 2010 By sem 4 Comments

Who knew that Boomers were such media-hungry digital infovores? New research on the media use habits of the age 45 to 54 consumer demographic by the CRE Mapping Study shows that they consume more TV and more Internet media than any other cohort.

Digital Boomers account for about one-third of Web traffic on a typical day, according to The Pew Internet and American Life Project. “In their younger years, they eagerly adopted new technologies such as Walkmans, VCRs, PCs, DVRs and the Internet,” said Lisa E. Phillips, senior analyst at eMarketer, and “most carry that adaptability into their 50s and 60s.”

What’s more, Boomers are active online social networkers, with about half maintaining a profile on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Trends in socialTV programming and promotion are now purposefully designed with the Boomers in mind.

With all of this tech savvy behavior, it’s no wonder that Harlequin Enterprises is following Boomers into social gaming. Harlequin was already way way out in front in developing ebooks—though others are following suit, to capitalize on cross-generational trend in mobile lifestyling, and digital Boomer-consumers’ love of reading and gadgetry. Coming up next: more gadgets with easy-to-see buttons and simplified functions (like this CosyPhone) for the over-50 set and their tired, screen-weary eyes.

Filed Under: ebooks, gaming, media use, mobile, social networks, television, video Tagged With: BlackBerry, cellphone, facebook, gaming, Internet, iPhone, iPod, mobile, smartphone, social media, social networking, social networks, TV, twitter, YouTube

user-gen trends

December 28, 2009 By sem 6 Comments

Betwixt and between prosumption, digital creativity, & social computing

It wasn’t long ago that social media types could confidently state what came to be known as the “90-9-1” rule. It captured the ratio of those who routinely create online content (1%), vis-a-vis those infrequent but occasional contributors (9%), and the vast majority of Internet users who were, for the most part, serial lurkers.

This scenario changed somewhat, or seemed poised to, in the first 5 years of the 2000s, with the rise of Wikipedia, when crowdsourcing became a catchword. Advertising campaigns invited consumers to get involved in creating mashups, to vote on TV spots, and to actively engage in marketing initiatives. This resulted in some memorable social media backlashes and campaign hijackings, an early example being the Chevy Tahoe video fiasco, and more recently the Skittles Twitter backlash. In the process, Generation C(ontent) emerged, described as a wave of digital creatives, using prosumer technologies from mac laptops to smartphones.

In the last half of the first decade of the 2000s came the next wave of change in digital culture, namely the rise of the social web. Facebook and Twitter memberships skyrocketed, social networking mainstreamed, social advertising took off. The “90-9-1 rule” became largely irrelevant in light of a multitude of studies that showed users spending extraordinary amounts of time online, sharing, contributing, and creating content to digitally distribute among their network of friends.

To illustrate the point, we could take a look at two new global studies of online media use released this week by Trendstream and Lightspeed Research reported by eMarketer. These surveys clarified what many edtech types and social media trendwatchers have known for awhile: a large part of the GenC digital native cohort is not very digitally creative or technologically savvy whatsoever, if we define those terms as being skilled in using, say, graphical image manipulation software, video editing programs, desktop publishing, spreadsheet use, or blogging and web design applications.

But status updates and photo uploads? No problem. According to the studies mentioned above for the most part all the online user-generated content activity that is happening out there is basically limited to filing in a social networking profile and posting digital photos online. In other words, the public is adept at point-and-shoot digital photography uploaded to Facebook, but if we look at trends in blogging or microblogging, even videography—the numbers are significantly lower.

Does posting a profile on MySpace, lifecasting tweets via IM, rating your favorite celebrities in a Facebook app, creating a what-I’m-reading booklist on Amazon.com, or tagging party pix from last night, involve real inspiration or inventiveness? Where would you plot these social computing activities on a user-gen media index, except somewhere poised between prosuming and digital creativity?

The bottom line: time to oust the 90-9-1 rule as too generalized to be truly useful, replacing it with some new distinctions between digital creativity, digital prosumption, and online interactions via social computing. Then we’ll be in a good position to mark gradations and innovations in modes of online user engagement and varieties of user generated digital media.