Single-screening: marketing’s big missed opportunity
Despite all the talk of engaging multi-screening consumers, the biggest marketing opportunity is targeting those that use different screens at different times exclusively, says Millward Brown’s Martin Ash as he takes us through the latest AdReaction study.
You can’t go to a conference these days without someone chatting about dual screening. Consumers, it seems, cannot get enough of their screens – so much so that they use them in tandem.
Domino’s sponsorship of the X-Factor app in the UK attempted to make the most of this opportunity. The dual-screen format (TV and mobile) featured branded games which offered players Domino’s deals and personalised promotional codes based on the success of their game-play. Interactive messages from the pizza chain were synchronised with TV ad spots.
But while that’s an important part of the picture, it’s not the whole story of consumer screen behaviour. To focus too much on dual screening is a bit like describing an elephant having only seen its tail.
Our 2014 AdReaction study highlights the true and much more complex story behind the seven hours that UK consumers spend with screens, TV, laptops, smartphones and tablets.
Marketers who are aggressively pursuing multi-screen strategies will be excited to know that our study highlights that multi-screen behaviours can give them the chance to trigger interactions between screens and deepen engagement with consumers – but there’s no proven silver bullet in this area. TV ads linking to digital resources are a familiar tactic and while platforms such as Shazam can help, they don’t deliver stand-out.
Equally, second screen play-alongs can be highly popular – the Coke Chase advert for Superbowl 2013 is a great example – but not all brands have the resource or scale to achieve this.
The key to taking advantage of multi-screen behaviour is consistency and the biggest opportunity is not simultaneous connections between screens, but rather a consistent presence across screens.
The study, which surveyed 12,000 16-44 year old multi-screen users (with access to both a TV and either a smartphone or a tablet), shows that a typical UK multi-screen user crams seven hours of screen media per day into a five-hour period.
In contrast to most other countries, TV remains the primary screen in the UK, taking up 2.5 hours of time daily. Smartphones are in action for just under two hours and laptops take just over an hour and a half.
Smartphones and laptops dominate daytime screen usage while TV takes centre-stage in the evenings, when tablet usage (just under an hour in total) also peaks.
Within this time 32% of screen time is simultaneous usage of TV and a digital device. Just 7% is simultaneous usage for related content and 24% is stacking or simultaneous usage for unrelated content.
What this reveals is that while multi-screening consumers present an opportunity, the biggest marketing opportunity remains sequential, or ‘shifting’ screen-users – those that use different screens at different times exclusively.
Effective and considered executions are the key for smartphone advertising as Millward Brown has consistently found that many consumers are resistant to some ad formats on mobile.
This ‘single-screening’ represents 68% of total screen time and provides more than three and a half hours a day of prime targeting time that many brands are overlooking in their pursuit of the elusive multi-screener.
Marketing receptivity is also higher for TV than for ads on digital screens, further building the case that TV is the dominant marketing screen in the UK, but brands cannot rely solely on TV ads. Consumers expect brands to be present on multiple devices and are impressed by those finding entertaining and useful ways of delivering across screens.
In fact, almost all screens can be used to drive brand-building messages if deployed effectively, but investing in a presence on smartphones infers you are setting trends and want to be different from other brands – much in the same way that TV infers you are a premium brand.
Brands that are increasing their mobile investment as part of a multi-screen strategy need to be nimble to build an effective presence. Micro-video is mobile-friendly and highly viral and is the format that consumers say they are most willing to accept from brands in our research.
If you want to maximise the value of the 68% of screen time when a consumer is paying full attention to a single screen then you need to make sure that whenever and wherever someone chooses to engage with your brand, your message is both present and prominent.
Martin Ash is research director at Millward Brown .