By: Matt Kleinschmit – Senior Vice President
So here we are, at the precipice, staring into the unknown, with our best days seemingly behind us and the chance of a grand collapse just below. It has been a long and prosperous trek into the digital future thus far, with innovative digital options wooing new customers to consume our content. But in the last little while, these same digital options have evolved into a new emerging media landscape, an increasingly empowered and socially-directed journey in which we seem to be losing our ability to control our path. You see, somewhere along the way, we gradually lost touch with what drives how we all consume news, music, video, games, conversations, networks and knowledge. The technology for consumers to truly control interactions with media, content, advertisers and others has produced unparalleled choice and control – and with it the media business has changed forever.
Emerging media is by name still growing and evolving. For some media channels this is a threat to their hegemony. To others it represents the last best hope of regaining their prominence. For all, emerging media is a transformative force that must be understood, managed and integrated into both current and future business strategy. This means offering consumers the breadth of immediate choice they have come to expect, interactive control over how they consume and advocate, and personalized content that fulfills an expected value proposition. Businesses that evolve their model to capitalize on this cultural shift and deliver on these principles will be recognized and rewarded – and those who do not will be perceived as increasingly out of touch with their customers.
Emerging media is becoming more and more central to the research we conduct at Vision Critical, as its role and influence are affecting not just media distributors, enabling technology manufacturers and content providers, but broader industries such as Consumer Products, Financial Services and Pharma. The use and influence of emerging media channels such as social, mobile and out-of-home are looming large for these industries as they seek to understand how to integrate them into their consumer marketing and engagement strategies. And for us as researchers, we are excited at pushing the envelope to gain insights about consumers via emerging media data collection techniques, such as our longitudinal proprietary custom community panels and mobile data collection capabilities.
We recently conducted a foundational study on evolving traditional and emerging media usage among the US, UK and Canadian populations. Some initial results of this study were presented in late October at the annual conference of the International Institute of Communications (IIC) in Montreal to a body of global regulators, content distributors and media innovators. Our presentation (Convergence in Action – PDF 2.3MB) covers some of the latest trends in media usage across these three countries, with special attention paid to how consumers are increasingly integrating emerging and social media into their daily lives.
What is extremely clear from the research is that people’s media use today is both staggering and expanding. Respondents in our research report spending more time consuming media that the average person spends sleeping (at nearly 9 hours a day), and simultaneous media usage, or ‘media meshing’ was reported by over half of consumers included in this research. And while the type of media consumption varies by demographics, we were intrigued to find that the overall number of 9 hours stays remarkably constant across age, gender and country – although greater media multitasking among youth is a telling sign of future media consumption dynamics.
Our research also highlighted the growing experimentation and usage of social media, as well as consumers’ apparent recognition of the future importance of this emerging media type. Three-quarters of respondents in all three countries believe that social media has brought people around the world closer together, and nearly half of respondents routinely look for news and connect with people outside of their own countries. While young people are leading the way on this, nearly one-third of people over the age of 65 report doing it on a regular basis as well.
Indeed, the rapid expansion of social media and enabling technologies has ushered in a communication game-changer that we haven’t seen since the printing press. Even people who aren’t using social media recognize its potential as a tool for global instantaneous communication, and those who do are increasingly using these technologies to bypass traditional mass channels that are often overpriced or overburdened with irrelevant content or unaddressable advertising.
What our research also revealed, however, is that it is important to know that these trends are not monolithic. Some consumer groups are clearly driving this usage and it’s critical for marketers to understand that they cannot simply throw all their eggs into the social media basket and hope for success. For example, while our results show some interesting consumer perceptions and usage momentum regarding social media – they also point to potential challenges this medium faces as it struggles to transform into a so-called established media channel (Press Release). Indeed, further behavioral and attitudinal segmentation of consumer trends and motivations are needed to complete this picture, as without which many marketing strategies will be doomed to fail if blindly applied in aggregate to the ‘New Normal’ in a rapidly evolving 2010 media landscape.
In the coming weeks we will be digging into more of these topics in this space, but for now….enjoy the initial results (Convergence in Action – PDF 2.3MB).
