Rise of the multi-screeners
In a room with a significant amount of dual screening of its own going on, last Friday morning’s MRG Conference focused on the impact and opportunities surrounding multi-screening and tablets for the industry.
With half of us now using a second screen while we’re watching TV (21% daily), Thinkbox carried out a study with COG Research to help the advertising community understand the context in which we do it.
The research included an examination of over 700 hours of people being filmed while watching TVs in their homes using Quividi camera analysis to capture who was in the room and where their visual attention was focused.
It showed that multi-screeners quite naturally share; from one-on-one interactions in person and via texting, to within their wider social circle and beyond – using applications like Twitter and Facebook rather than specialist ones.
Despite having divided attention, the study found that multi-screening had no impact on participants’ ad recognition and recall (perhaps due to the ‘cocktail party effect’) and, in fact, multi-screeners were actually more likely to stay in the room and on the same channel for the ad break than the general population (81% against 72%).
Google’s Richard Curling and Adam Sheridan from Ipsos Media next presented their research into the effect of three screen ownership on online and offline behaviour. They found there has been a shift to three screen users being constantly online and that tablets encourage more online usage rather than cannibalizing people’s exisiting usage.
People are still far more likely to conduct secure commercial transactions within the home but are using mobiles and tablets to conduct them more often than their PCs.
They also demonstrated how people’s patterns of device usage change over the course of the day and week using a neat piece of data visualisation – with mobile use being more frequent in the morning at the weekend for example.
When Liz Landy from IPSOS MediaCT introduced the session, she told us that 11% of us now have a tablet, a number which is expected to grow significantly over the Christmas period.
With understanding the differences in usage and behaviour across online devices becoming increasingly important, Denise Turner of MPG MediaContacts shared some insights from their global study with InMobi.
They found that people love their tablets and don’t want to be separated from them; they are used as much for entertainment as life admin – with over half of owners accessing more than an hour of media content a day.
As in Google’s research, they found that tablet ownership increases the time people spend on digital devices but that it does cannibalize time spent on print readership across books, magazines and newspapers.
Tablet ownership can also impact the amount of time people spend in physical stores with 22% claiming they shop less in them and 68% making a purchase on their tablet device each month.