The themes of responding to the consumer being in control of media, the need for more targeted plans and more elegant metrics kept cropping up during the panels and presenters that took the podium during Forecast 2006, MediaPost‘s annual conference on The Future of Media. One fascinating research project was presented – the Middletown Media Studies – that seems to hold the key to at least part of that puzzle.
Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment and Robert Papper, telecom prof of Ball State University Center for Media Design, unveiled some top-line findings from a deeply forensic media consumption study conducted on 400 Indiana consumers, 18+, over the course of a week. Researchers observed the Muncie and Indianapolis subjects from as early in the morning to as late in the day as permissible, logging their media consumption in 15 second intervals, in context of the person’s activities – eating, watching kids, etc. They went shopping with them, they went to work with them, and they logged it all. With over 5,000 hours of observations and 1.2 million data records they believe it to be the largest observational media study of its kind.
Media use is the single largest activity of all, at a whopping nine hours a day, and TV remains the 800-pound gorilla at about four hours a day. Overall, the computer (all activities) is in second place at just over two hours on average. The study also tracked use of the cellphone, as they felt it was important to get a baseline of behaviour as people are increasingly using it as a media tool. Over 30% of the media day, consumers used two or more media concurrently.
And this was not just the youth segment, 96.3% of the sample spent 30.7% of the day multi-media tasking. The top media combo dominating time spent was TV & Web, and 28.9% of total TV time was spent in concurrent media exposure.
The nature of the concurrent media exposure changed from demo to demo; the younger consumers might be on the computer and their mobile, while the older group were watching their soaps and discussing them with friends on their landline telephone, or indulging in more traditional media pairings, such as TV and newspaper. In fact the 40+ crowd logged more concurrent media exposure than the 18-39ers.
A series of reports on different issues will be forthcoming, as they delve deeper into the data and findings, such as media use by personality. This leads to a question one of the delegates broached over lunch: with the increased need for more consumer behavioural-targeting enabling data, who is arm’s length enough to supply it, and perhaps more importantly, who’s going to pay for it?
And for some, the question remains what to measure. During a panel discussion, New York based media pundit Erwin Ephron said: ‘When it comes down to doing a media plan, you need numbers and insight, and when you focus on the consumer, it doesn’t give you anything to do.’
Ephron, renowned for calling it like it is, cut to the core of the measurement dilemma: ‘Everyone has to know what they’re talking about, everyone’s mentioning engagement. What is it? A ring?’
