How would you feel about somebody following you around all day jotting down your media consumption every 10 minutes on an electronic notepad? Not good, irritated maybe? Well that’s exactly what the Council For Research Excellence (CRE) did in the US with 376 people across a total of 950 observable days to try and get a “true” understanding of individuals media consumption (in particular video) based on observable habit rather than personal recall.
And the outcome? No assaults apparently, but some interesting observations and highlights. (The full study has not yet been released)
One interesting observation was that respondents are often incorrect in self-reporting media consumption. For example, TV viewing time was significantly under reported in the respondents own recall vs. the observed usage, whereas respondents significantly over-reported both online video and mobile video use. This may simply be a result of familiar versus new and the disproportionate focus / importance we give to the new. However, in light of the ongoing discussion around viewers defection away from TV to other video screens and subsequent marketing decisions that (may be partially based on self-reported media consumption data) reflect this “trend”, I am sure this will help enliven the debate.
The real key finding is that despite the growth of a multi - screen universe of multimedia computers and handheld video devices, TV is still king of screens and by a significant margin.
The CRE study claims the average American (18+) spends 8.7hours per day engaged with some form of video content (TV, console, computer, handheld), of which 5.8hours involves the TV screen. TV content, at least in the US, appears to be the comfort media of a recession.
Another finding was that the 30 second spot is NOT dead by the fact that TV viewers are exposed, on average, to 72 minutes per day of commercials and promo’s. Avid ad avoidance appears to not be the case at all.
Video did not kill the radio star, and from first cut results of this research it would appear TV continues to be the ‘old faithful’ in the face of emerging new technologies and choice in screens. The full study will no doubt reveal more. So stay tuned.
