Digital Day – what do people do all day?

Catherine Evans, senior research executive at GfK NOP Media, on the way people make a huge range of media activities and devices fit into their already hectic lives…

Last August Ofcom reported that UK adults spend just under half their waking lives with media or communications technology. Over seven hours a day doing any of fifty-plus different activities across the spectrum of video, audio, print and games media, voice or text communication… as well as somehow fitting in mundane activities like eating, cleaning, working, studying and looking after their kids.

That figure and many of the others in 2010’s Communications Market Report came from research conducted by GfK NOP Media for Ofcom as part of the Digital Day study: an innovative media diary that provided a single data source for the way people make a huge range of media activities and devices fit into their already hectic lives.

What was even more impressive was that most people managed to pack in more than eight and a half hours of actual media content into those seven hours by doing more than one thing at once: sitting and surfing – or texting – in front of the TV, or listening to music while they browsed the web. The youngest people (aged 16-24), unsurprisingly, are most adept at this: for more than half of the time this groups spends using media, they’re using two or more forms at once.

Figure 1 – solus/simultaneous media consumption. Ofcom, 2010.

All of these figures were collected in April/May 2010: before smartphones had fully established themselves and before the rise of the single-use device par excellence, Amazon’s Kindle and the birth of tablet computing.

Last year we found that, despite healthy figures for smartphone ownership (12% of our sample owning either a BlackBerry or an iPhone and 33% owning any phone with internet access; according to a March 2011 report by Olswang, smartphone ownership is now around 20%), there was a clear and unsurprising profile of the typical owner: male (55% of owners), aged 18-44 (62%; 48% 25-44).

We also found that although a lot of people were starting to invest in this new technology, most were only scratching the surface of its media and communication potential: for example, the top 5% of smartphone users were accounting for 81% of mobile internet browsing, and the proportion of all media use accounted for by mobile media (video and audio) was minimal – even for the younger users.

Figure 2 – distribution of mobile phone browsing. Ofcom, 2010.

Figure 3 – mobile phone usage by activity. Ofcom 2010.

GfK NOP Media will repeat the Digital Day study in October 2011, this time as a syndicated study. One of our key themes for this year will be how the widening participation in mobile media is changing the game: whether a broader cross-section of owners are starting to tap the potential of their smartphones, whether these devices are starting to become a key part of individual consumers’ media landscape… and how the tablets and Kindles that surround us on commuter trains every single morning have made a difference.

This is only scratching the surface of what this incredibly rich dataset can tell us and there’s still time to come on board, help us shape the 2011 survey and arrange for access to all of the data in its custom reporting tool.

If you’d like to talk about Digital Day or find out more about the next wave of the study, please contact Guy Holcroft ([email protected]) or Catherine Evans ([email protected]).

All 2010 Digital Day data is the property of Ofcom.