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media tasking
Half of us use more than one medium at a time
By Toni Fitzgerald
Too busy to make dinner? Order out. Not enough time for exercise? Take a brisk walk from driveway to front door.
With less time and more things to do, Americans are consolidating--multitasking, if you will.
Multitasking is an especially notable trend in media, with more people consuming more media at the same time. So says new research from BIGresearch.
Women, it turns out, are doing it more than men.
“Over 50 percent of the people we surveyed engaged in some sort of simultaneous media usage,” says Gary Drenik, a partner at BIGresearch. “There are all these new activities, and only 24 hours a day to fit them into.”
Past studies have found a confluence between television watching and internet usage.
This study finds that the pattern, in fact, exists across all media, including traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and radio.
We listen to the radio as we read a magazine while flipping through the newspaper to find out what is on TV as we reach for the remote.
More than half of male and female users read magazines with the radio on, watch TV while they read newspapers or magazines, and watch TV while they surf the net.
The study has important implications for advertisers and media planners. Drenik says it shows that singular usage has become a thing of the past.
“People don’t use media in silos,” he says. “They go home and they don’t have four and half hours to spend at the television. They don’t spend three hours just listening to the radio. We don’t use media that way anymore.
“We feel that this has been going on for sometime, it’s just that no one measures media that way. We measure in silos: radio listening, television viewing.”
The study shows that a significantly larger number of women engage in simultaneous usage compared to men. Almost three-quarters of females read the newspaper while they have the TV on, compared to two-thirds of men. Two-thirds of women vs. less than 60 percent of men watch TV when they go online.
In the age of the working mother, those discrepancies aren’t hard to explain. Women may be even more time-pressed than men, and that leads to compression on the extras. That’s only compounded by new technology.
The hour or two a working mother had in the past to watch television is now an hour or two to watch television and use the internet. So the two get lumped together more often than not – 76 percent of women have the TV on when they go online.
“Certainly the internet has created much more of a [time] demand. It requires people to spend time when they would have been doing something else [going] online,” Drenik says. “That’s to the exclusion of something else or done in conjunction with something else.”
The lesson here for advertisers is careful targeting. Know your audience, and know when the radio in the background is just background, and when it’s the focus.
“Advertisers have to determine which ones are dominant when,” Drenik says. “They’ll try to do a creative take across various media using simultaneous approaches, to have a synergy in the creative side reflecting the usage. Running a particular type of commercial on television that targets a group watching television and also using the internet.
“You want the creative to build on each other, to increase the intensity of the message.”
October 25, 2002© 2002 Media Life
-Toni Fitzgerald is a staff writer for Media Life.
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