medialifemagazine.com
Boys with toys: Profile of the tech elite
By Heidi Dawley
May 20, 2008 - 1:05:15 AM
Once being digitally hip called for little more than a cell phone and broadband.
Life was simpler then.
These days one has to be a real technology whiz. The truly hip stream video on their cell phones, keep blogs and watch videos online. They're likely to own a high-definition TV set, have Vonage or some other VoIP phone service, and listen to satellite radio.
But just who are these hip Americans?
Scarborough Research set out to find out, trawling the country to locate the digitally savvy and determine just how they stand out from the general population.
Scarborough defined 18 different behaviors and classified folks that engaged in at least eight as digitally savvy. Other categories within the 18 include owning a digital video recorder and an MP3 player, paying bills online, gaming online, downloading video and using their cell phones to email (see chart, below).
Overall some 6 percent of the U.S. population falls into this group. The survey involved a sample of 111,051 people over six months.
The findings were in many ways what one would expect. The group tends to be young and affluent, also males. They're early adopters as well, and all that makes them ideal targets for marketers, especially marketers of gadgets.
They are also likely to be entrepreneurial and to have a long commute. Yet they are also active and athletic, engaging in things like yoga and basketball. And they are more likely than the average Joe to be fans of sports leagues like the NFL or NBA.
Interestingly this group also has a higher percentage of Hispanics and Asians than the general population.
They're most likely to live in the West. The city with the highest percentage of digitally savvy residents is Austin, Texas, at 12 percent. Others in the top four are Las Vegas, Sacramento and San Diego, with each having 10 percent of its residents falling into this category.
Their affluence means these tech savvies are heavy luxury consumers too. Some 27 percent went to an upscale restaurant in the past month versus just 13 percent of the general population. And 12 percent spent $500 or more on business clothes compared to 4 percent.
They also spend heavily online, with 54 percent spending $500 or more last year compared to 25 percent of the general population.
Thanks to all that time commuting, they are heavier-than-average radio listeners and more likely than average to be exposed to out-of-home advertising. They are average newspaper readers, but more inclined than most to read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or USA Today.
They are light broadcast TV viewers but heavy in terms of their use of cable TV and other premium services. They are also more likely to tune into MSNBC, CNN or CNBC, but not Fox News.
But there’s a hitch.
Ironically, as wired in as these folks are, they are in another senses wired out, hard to reach. “One thing was that this group of people that we call digitally savvy tend to be very elusive,” says Gary Meo, senior vice president of print and digital media services at Scarborough Research. That means they aren't as reachable through traditional mass media, for example, local TV.
But they are not unreachable. “One way to reach them is through digital platforms because that’s where they are,” says Meo, pointing to internet, mobile devices, digital cable, cell phones and satellite radio.
Click here for the complete report
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Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended May 11, according to Nielsen Online, Google claimed the top spot among parent companies, followed by Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and News Corp. Online. The top five brands were Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, Microsoft and AOL Media Network for the eighth straight week.
Experian Group Limited regained the No. 1 advertiser spot with 5.8 million impressions, knocking Nextag down to No. 2 at 5.6 million. With 27.9 million ads served, Yahoo was again the top advertising site, well ahead of No. 2 MySpace at almost 5 million.
Sessions per person per week were up one from the previous week to 17, and domains visited per person were even at 39. PC time per person was flat compared with the previous week, at 17 hours and 32 minutes.