MRG conference: The consumer’s digital day
Last week, Guy Holcroft, director at GFK, talked to MRG delegates about multi-tasking and how the results of a recent study conducted on behalf of Ofcom revealed how consumers are using the vast array of devices that are now available to them.
The study also provided insights into whether our established media methods are under threat from the increasing amount of choice.
What are we doing with our devices? What do we do all day? Do we really multi-task? To what extent are people doing more than one thing at a time?
These were some of the measurement challenges that GFK NOP faced during the study, which was conducted using a paper diary where participants were asked to log which of the 45 listed activities they were doing during their day.
Activities included emailing, internet browsing and mobile phone use as well as more traditional activities such as making phone calls and watching the television.
The study found that the average person is spending around seven and a half hours a day using different media content and communications services – that’s more than nearly half our waking hours.
Furthermore, Holcroft also reported that we are managing to “cram over eight hours and 40 minutes worth of multi-tasking into the day”. It has also emerged that computer use, while a strong tool of communication, varies with age: “People aged over 55 are spending just under 40% of their time using a computer to communicate with others, and they are more likely to use email, not social networking”, Holcroft said.
Younger people, on the other hand, are more likely to use social networking for communication and spend half of their time on computers to this end. Overall, mobile usage and computer activity is reported to have the highest simultaneous media use with “57% of mobile phone usage taking place alongside other media activity and 62% for computer use”.
The study found that younger kids, aged 12 to 15 years, are spending more time than any other age group on computers, handheld devices and text based activities, whereas “TV is still king” for adults.
Holcroft said, as many of us would have predicted, that we are multi-tasking more than ever before, and that unsurprisingly it is the younger consumers who are using mobiles, computers and watching the television more than the older generation.
With an increasing choice of devices, the wide reach of television platforms and greater presence of broadband now in UK homes, it is likely that this trend is set to continue.
However, what the study also showed is that while media multi-tasking is popular during the day, “in the evenings, the proportion of people using media increases rapidly” and it is here that we see that “TV viewing is still top” as the main activity for many people in the evening.
Click here to see the full Ofcom study.