By Alex Kenney
If you’re reading this without consuming any other media at the same time, whether watching TV, checking your mobile device or listening to music – you are in the minority. A recent Knowledge Networks study showed that two-thirds of all Internet time is spent using another medium simultaneously, and this behavior has been steadily increasing over the past several years and across all platforms.1 As marketers, this has crucial implications on how we communicate with consumers.
The Modern Day Viewing Experience
With all the speculation around TV viewership declining as new technologies emerge, TV viewership has actually increased by 22 minutes per month over the prior year.2 What is changing is how we watch TV and what other activities and devices are competing for our attention, and ideally augmenting our experience, while we’re doing so. Media multitasking is behavior that we’ve seen for years, but the recent rise of smartphone penetration (currently 43% of the U.S. population3 and projected to continue rising) is taking this behavior to a new level. The ability to access information wherever you are and whenever you like becomes practically addictive. In fact, 7% of all digital traffic in the U.S. is consumed on mobile devices and tablets instead of computers.4 This presents an immense opportunity for marketers to connect with people on the go and on the couch, always thinking holistically about the entire experience from the consumers’ perspective.
And when looking specifically at TV viewership, 80% of web-enabled phone owners are mobile multitasking while watching TV, with nearly half of them doing so every day.5 Sixty percent of these multitaskers access the mobile web during commercials, 38% of which is related to the content being watched. This means there is great opportunity to better connect with the majority of viewers who are doing activities unrelated to the viewing experience. The more fun and unique ways that advertisers can encourage this behavior, the more likely viewers will be to engage with the brand. One of my favorite examples from this year was the Old Navy commercial that prompted viewers to use the Shazam app to identify the song in the spot and shop the look. That took it a step beyond just showing their website URL on the screen and tried to engage viewers on a different level. We should expect to see a lot more of this type of spot next year.
Know Your Target
As with any marketing strategy, knowing your target is paramount to determine if this 360° experience makes sense for your brand. Multitasking is happening much more frequently among Millenials than older consumers, and young women specifically are the most likely demographic to surf the Internet related to what they’re watching on TV (almost two-thirds of women under the age of 35 do so currently). And if your target skews upscale and therefore more likely to own a tablet, that opens up a world of opportunity to connect with your audience. Searching for content related to what’s on TV is much more prevalent among tablet multitaskers than laptop/desktop multitaskers.
Making It Social
Delivering real-time messages that connect viewers together socially, both through programming or advertising, gives an extra incentive to forget using that DVR. The water cooler is live, and anyone not participating is left out of the conversation. MTV’s Twitter Tracker allows viewers during the VMAs to go online and see what the stars were tweeting in real time from the audience, while also allowing viewers to tweet. This is a great example of a content provider that successfully gained control of the natural conversation happening and ensured not being left out of it.
Sporting events especially offer a unique opportunity to connect with viewers in real time through their additional devices. Football Sundays at my house typically include the TV broadcasting the event, an NFL app open on the iPad and a Twitter feed on the smartphone to follow along with sportswriters’ opinions and inside information. This is fantastic from a consumer perspective, receiving additional information about the event while enabling information about other games on at the same time. From a marketing perspective, we need to continue to always think about delivering messaging that ties the whole experience together on Facebook, Twitter and beyond.
Ultimately, the way we need to think about media consumption is from a multiscreen perspective. It’s not about reaching someone through mobile, and separately through TV, radio, print or online. It’s about how we can best connect all of these channels together simultaneously to ultimately provide a more engaging experience for the user around the content, as well as the advertising.