Return on Intention

Its easy to think that the world of traditional media is going away. There is no shortage of people screaming from their soap boxes that the internet will render all of this antiquated technology useless. Revolution is sexy. Unfortunately change rarely happens this way. Its usually a process of evolution. While the internet may seem to be a drastic fast changing technology, it might be a good idea to remember that the internet and the web took quite a few years to become what it is today.  In this world of twitter and iPhones its hard to believe that there are still many people in America that have never been on the internet. So while it seems that the world is changing to make the television and the ad model that so many companies have become accustomed to using a thing of the past, its nice to stop and take a look at some data on the subject.

Its good to keep in mind that through all the innovation that have occurred in media, new media hasn’t killed old media. This seems to still hold true, at least according to the latest report on the 3 screens from Nielson. The report about the “3 screens” (1st screen – tv, 2nd screen – computer / internet, 3rd screen – mobile devices / phones) has a few nice tidbits of information that should have you stop and think before you call up your traditional media advertising agency and cancel your account.

While the report does show some growth for the digital channels (online video is up about 35%) and the new ( sort of ) time shifing technology (DVR usage is up about 21%) it also shows that 99% of video consumed in America was done on traditional TV.  The report also shows that the “older” demographics are increasing their consumption of all media types (I have a hard time classifying 35 year-olds as “older”). So basically you can reach nearly all demographics using online channels, but the kicker here is that you can still reach 99% of the video viewers on good old traditional un-time shifted TV.

Whats really going here is two trends that keep growing year over year: 1.) we are consuming more media, and 2.) we multi-task media. According to this report “Americans consume media at a record pace – 129 hrs of TV, 27 hrs of Internet, 3 hrs of mobile video each month”. According to these numbers, we spend just about as much time interacting with video content as we do sleeping every month. The growth numbers we see for the online and mobile channels are not coming out of people’s TV time, but are in addition too them. We are still a nation of TV watchers, but we also do it online and from our phones. This seems reasonable. When I got my iPhone I started to read my Google reader from it and checking my twitter feed resulting in my “usage” of those things to increase, but not at the expense of my other media habits.

The trend of multi-tasking media is not much of a surprise either. Working from home sometimes ( read  – all the time ) means digging through clients analytics looking for insight from the couch on my laptop while House is playing on TV. I just love his snarky humor. According to this report, its not just me.

Seth Goden called it out over a decade ago in “Permission Marketing” – while permission marketing is the goal, we will always have the need to interrupt people to get them to raise their hand to sign up.  The first part of any sales or marketing funnel is awareness, and that will always require the skills  we have learned over the years in traditional advertising. While the mediums may change, the ability to craft a relay a good story will always be needed. I predict that the future belongs to the agencies / groups / people who can add the skill sets of both the “old” and “new”. There may be a Revolution under foot… er, evolution.

Tags: 3 screens, advertising, mobile, nielson, report, tv

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 12:07 am and is filed under Mar Comm, The Wild Wild Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.