The Challenge of the Fourth Dimension Today advertisers are fighting harder than ever before for their customers’ attention, spending increasingly larger sums to “buy time,” not space or air. It used to be that an important aspect of ad sales was context—that is, how the content surrounding an advertisement could enhance the ad’s effectiveness. That's still true, of course. But increasingly. the question is also whether a medium can deliver value in the form of time—that is, consumer attention measured by the clock. Do We Have Your Attention? In 2001, IBM Business Consulting Services told marketers that getting customers’ attention was as important as paying attention to their customers: Companies that view attention as a resource will commit to respecting and cultivating attention. Your company must plant attention, harvest it, plant it elsewhere. Strategy and decision-making will involve greater creativity in thinking about people… Paying attention to people involves continuously figuring out how to relate to, inspire, recruit, ally, align and attract people. Conventional wisdom holds that the most desirable and influential customers in a market segment are those who invest the most money. In a time-constrained world, however, it may be that an investment of time is more meaningful than an investment of money—that the most desirable and influential customers in a market segment are those who invest the most time pursuing their interests. The time readers invest in an activity, and the time they invest in reading about that activity, are an increasingly precious currency. Most Americans believe they have less leisure time than they used to, and the big picture shows there’s some truth to their belief. Americans are working longer hours today than they were in the 1970s, and have less time to devote to personal pursuits. According to the Harris Poll, the average American adult had about 25 percent more leisure time in 1973 than today. In her 1992 book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline in Leisure, Harvard economist Juliet Schor found that between 1969 and 1987 the hours American workers spent on the job increased by the equivalent of more than a month's worth of labor per worker per year. Schor found this trend among both men and women, and among both professionals and low-paid workers. The increase reversed a century-long trend of declining hours spent in paid labor. Unlike workers in every other industrialized Western nation, she says, Americans “choose” money over time. But the trend has changed in recent years. Despite Americans’ perception that they have less leisure time with every passing year, there’s as much leisure time available today as there was when Schor wrote her book 15 years ago. The amount of leisure time available has held stable in every Harris Poll since 1989. What has shifted in recent years is how Americans use their leisure time and especially how they use (or are exposed to) media. If time is money, as the cliché goes, we might say that time spent on things we can’t avoid—like sleeping and working—is fixed, and that leisure time is discretionary. And in the same way that companies compete for our income, an increasing number of activities compete for our leisure time. There’s no question that new, “trendy” activities like jet-skiing or rock climbing get lots of press. Likewise, the expansion of new media like the Internet, cable television, video recordings, and video games is indisputable, and each of these has claimed a significant share of media usage in the past three decades. But in the end, however, old standbys remain Americans’ true favorites. According to Harris, the six most popular ways of spending leisure time today are: 1. In recent years, the biggest gainer has been—no surprise—computer activities. The increase in computing’s popularity came at the expense of television viewing, which has declined in popularity by the same amount that computing has grown. Of greater interest to publishers, reading has topped every Harris Poll since 1995, and the number of people who list reading as a favorite activity has stayed fairly steady over the past 12 years. This conflicts a little with the conventional wisdom that magazines, newspapers, and books are losing their audiences to online media. Could it be that broadcasters have more to worry about than publishers? Perceptions and Realities Well, as we mentioned earlier, there are some differences between how people perceive their use of time and how they really use it. The Harris Poll measures preferences. The reality of how Americans spend their time is measured every year by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics in the American Time Use Survey. The latest ATUS study, based on data collected in 2006, found that the average work day for an employed adult includes 9.3 hours on the job, 7.6 hours sleeping, and 4.1 hours spent on activities like eating, childcare, housework, and shopping. That leaves about three hours of leisure time on weekdays. Naturally, there’s more leisure time on weekends, and consequently the average American has around 35 or 40 hours of leisure time to spend each week. According to the ATUS, men have more leisure time than women: 5.7 versus 4.9 hours per day on average. Men are also more likely than women to participate in sports, exercise, or recreation on any given day. TV viewing is Time spent reading for personal interest, playing games, or using a computer for leisure varies dramatically by age. The ATUS tells us that adults over age 75 read for 2.8 hours on an average weekend and play games or use a computer for 24 minutes. Conversely, teenagers (age 15 to 19) read for an average of 14 minutes on an average weekend and spend 2 hours playing games or using a computer. Use of leisure time varies significantly not only by sex, age, and day of the week, but also by income, employment status, occupation, education, ethnicity, marital status, family size, and a full complement of other factors. The deeper you get into the numbers (and the ATUS has a lot of numbers to get into), the more you realize that averages don’t apply well across the board: we’re all individuals with differing amounts of leisure time and differing interests. In fact, the deeper you get into the numbers, the more you realize that few experts actually agree about the numbers themselves. The ATUS, for example, is compiled from interviews with about 13,000 individuals who report their activities for the preceding 24 hours. If respondents report doing more than one activity at a time, they're asked to identify which activity was primary. In the Harris Poll people list their “top two or three favorite” leisure activities. The slightly different approaches yield significantly different data. For example, the Harris Poll tells us that reading is a favorite activity of almost one fourth of the respondents. Fewer (about one sixth) say that watching TV is a favorite. The ATUS, however, reports that respondents spend much more time in an average week watching TV than reading: about 18 hours of TV versus 2.5 hours of reading. This demonstrates that there can be a big difference between how we feel about an activity and how much time we devote to it. Media by the Numbers If the experts disagree on how Americans spend their leisure time (or how much leisure time there is) they don’t come any closer to agreeing on how much time we spend with media. A half dozen or so respected and highly credible sources of information on the subject provide significantly different findings The annual Communications Industry Forecast from media equity advisors Veronis, Suhler, Stevenson, a kind of bible for media measurement, indicates that the average American adult spends about 67 hours per week with consumer media of all kinds, including broadcast, Internet, and print. Nielsen Media Research, on behalf of the Television Bureau of Advertising, estimated in 2006 that we spend about 61 hours per week with TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. A 2005 Web-based study from Forrester indicated that the average adult spends about 40 hours per week with various selected media—broadcast, video, video games, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. And a 2006 study from JupiterResearch examining the media usage habits of 3,000 online users found they spent about 36 hours per week reading magazines and newspapers, listening to the radio, watching television, and going online. Experts don’t even agree on how much time we spend with TV, the most popular medium. Forrester says we watch about 13 hours per week. Jupiter’s survey respondents watch about 14 hours per week. The Bureau of Labor's American Time Use Survey says that the average American watches about 18 hours of TV per week. And the Communications Industry Forecast and Nielsen both say we watch about 30 hours per week on average. Obviously, the devil’s in the details… because a swing of more than 100 percent is a pretty big margin of error. So… is it 13, 14, 18, 30… or “all the above”? Multitasking—Noted and Otherwise The primary reason for these discrepancies is our American genius for multitasking. Not only can we do two things at once—when it comes to media, we often do more than two. Sometimes we're exposed to several media at the same time (such as reading a newspaper with the television on). Sometimes we’re exposed to media while we engage in other activities (such as listening to the radio when driving). And sometimes we’re exposed to multiple media while engaged in other activities (such as reading a magazine and listening to MP3s when eating). This multitasking has reached unprecedented levels, and concurrent media exposure—CME to the insiders—has emerged as a major concern to advertising professionals. Some studies, like the American Time Use Survey, make a pointed effort to exclude “background” media from their measurements: they ask respondents to identify their primary activity and ignore secondary activities. Others, like Nielsen, measure only whether media are “used,” not how well they're attended. It turns out that exposure we notice and exposure we don’t notice are two very different media experiences. In fact, the amount of media we’re exposed to without noticing may exceed the amount that we do notice. The results of different research surveys vary so widely because when consumers report only the media they pay attention to, they substantially under-report the total amount of media they’re exposed to. Researchers from The survey found that exposure to media occupies more time in the average adult’s life than any other activity… and that the exposure often occurs without being noticed. The MMS2 study found that about 30 percent of the average adult’s waking day was spent with media as the sole activity, while an additional 39 percent of the waking day was spent with media while involved in some other activity. According to the MMS2 study, television, the dominant medium in terms of time, is present in our lives about 28 hours per week. About 30 percent of the time, TV is exposed concurrently with other media. And about 50 percent of the time, people are engaged in another activity while being exposed to TV. It may be worth pausing to note that the average adult spends about 108 hours awake per week. This means that the television is present during a quarter of our waking lives and that we’re exposed to some form of media about two thirds of the time we’re awake. Clearly, quite a bit of media use isn’t a leisure activity at all—it’s a major part of our jobs and an inescapable part of our environment. Let’s use data from the annual VSS Communications Industry Forecast to examine how media use has changed and expanded over the past several years. When the decade began, the average American adult was exposed to 3,333 hours of media per year. By 2004 this had increased 6.5 percent to 3,483. We’ve noted that television is by far our most-used medium; it consistently represents about 44 percent of total consumer media exposure measured in the VSS Forecast, year after year. Radio, the second most frequently-used consumer medium, provides about 1,000 hours of soundtrack to the average adult’s year, a figure that’s remained generally constant through the decade. While the Internet has achieved a presence in practically every aspect of our lives, the VSS Forecast shows that it isn’t as much of a consumer phenomenon as you might have thought. In 2004 consumers spent about as much time on the Internet (183 hours per year) as they did listening to recorded music (179). Trends were a different matter: time spent listening to recorded music declined 32 percent between 2000 and 2005; time spent on the Internet increased by 83 percent. We should emphasize that these Internet figures don’t include time spent online at work, time spent using the computer offline, or time spent playing video games (which increased 28 percent between ’00 and ’04). We could also note that consumer Internet use is projected to reach 200 hours per year per adult in 2008—double the use in 2000. Consumer exposure to print media declined by about eight percent in the first half of the decade, from 443 hours per year in 2000 to 413 in 2004, and is projected to decline a bit more to 392 hours per year in 2008. Almost all the decline in print is due to flagging interest in newspapers; consumer book and magazine reading has held steady since 2001. (We’ll focus more on print below.) Saturation—at Last! It’s possible that people have finally reached the limit of their capacity to absorb the output of our constantly expanding media. In 2007 the Veronis, Suhler, Stevenson Forecast showed a slight dip in the amount of time that consumers spent with media—the first decline since 1997— from 3,548 to 3,530 hours per year. VSS explains the decline by noting that digital alternatives for information and entertainment require less time than their traditional media counterparts. For example, consumers typically watch broadcast or cable television at least 30 minutes per session, while they spend as little as five to seven minutes viewing consumer-generated video clips online. It takes only a couple of minutes online to get the same amount of information delivered in a half hour of TV news. “We all knew that there was only 24 hours in the day, and even with multitasking there would be a point where people maxed out,” said James Rutherfurd, executive vice president and managing director at Veronis, Suhler, Stevenson. “It has just come a little faster than we thought because of the efficiency of digital media.” And it probably comes with relief to the poor consumer. Considering that we’re exposed to other media (like billboards, direct mail, and events) in addition to the 3,500 hours per year of media measured in the Forecast, it isn’t surprising that we’d hit a saturation point sooner or later. The Fine Print The various research studies we’ve mentioned report that the average American spends between one and two hours per week reading magazines. While magazines don't have quite the ubiquitous presence of radio and TV, they have one strong point in their favor: they command attention. The study found that when people are exposed simultaneously to a magazine and another medium, they almost always give their primary focus to the magazine. It turns out that about 70 percent of the time people during which people are reading magazines they’re concurrently exposed to other media: most commonly TV, radio, or music. Fortunately, in concurrent advertising exposure that involves a magazine, the magazine’s advertisers get greater value. A consumer’s attention is much more meaningful than background exposure. And a person reading a magazine with the radio or TV on will notice and remember the magazine ads… broadcast commercials fade into the background. About 40 percent of the time spent with magazines is spent simultaneously with other non-media activities, most frequently eating (which occurs about 10 percent of the time), and reading while working (which occurs about seven percent of the time). Magazines have another unique characteristic: they’re the medium used most often outside the home and work. Distribution in waiting rooms and other public place is the explanation. And Now, the Kicker If you’ve stuck with us so far—and we certainly admire your tolerance for numbers if you have—you’ve probably realized that none of it’s real. There are no such things as the average adult, the average day, or average exposure to a medium. There are more than 300 million Americans, and each of us consumes media differently every single day. Here are some of the more obvious ways in which one group of individuals can differ from another: -Media use varies by demographics, including sex, age, profession, income, and education. -Media use varies by media preference. People who are heavy users of one medium use other media differently. -Media use varies by day of the week and time of day. In order for you as a publisher to harness this information—to put time to work for you—it’s important to see how people in your market and in your readership allocate their time. It’s a dead certainty that they’re using it differently than people in other markets and other audiences. Here are a few other points you can take as given: Time is an important dynamic in the market your publication serves. In any market the people who are the most passionate, the most involved, and the most likely to influence others can be identified by investments of time as well as money. Time is also an important dynamic in your readership. People who spend more time reading about an activity are invariably more passionate, more involved, and more influential. The attention that a reader pays to a subject—which is best measured in time—is the one item of greatest value that a publisher can offer an advertiser. As media exposure expands, the customer’s attention becomes harder and harder for advertisers to attract and hold… and increasingly important. Publishers who can document the use of time in markets and audiences have a substantial advantage over competitors who restrict themselves to more traditional metrics. Time adds an extra dimension to measurement—as any physicist will tell you. So let’s look at how you can use time to sell ads. Some of the terminology below will vary depending on whether you publish a business-to-business or consumer magazine and depending on the market you serve… but the concepts are the same. -Do you know how the most influential people in your market allocate their time? Your Audience -Do you know how the most influential people in your audience allocate their time? Your Advertisers -Do your advertisers have information about their customers’ use of time? We started out by saying that Sandy Denny’s song, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” asks a pretty good question. Publishers who can answer the question—either fully or in part—are providing significant value for their advertisers and are positioning themselves significantly ahead of their competition. * * * Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast (summary) IBM Business Consulting Services: Vying for Attention Ball State (IN) University MMS2 Study
February 22, 2008
Back in the ’70s, Sandy Denny wrote a song called, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” It’s a darn good question… and it’s harder to answer than you might think. Knowing how much time consumers have, and how they spend it, can be vital intelligence for a magazine publisher—and a very effective sales tool.
Perceptions of Leisure
Fighting for Time
2. Watching TV
3. Spending time with family
4. Computer activities
5. Going to the movies
6. Fishing
Media Trends
Time's Up. Back to Work!
Your Market.
-Do they use time differently than other people in the market?
-Can you measure the relationship between market influence and time spent?
-Can you measure the relationship between money spent and time spent?
-How much time do people in your market spend with various information sources?
-What are the key trends in time use in your market?
-What helps influential people in your market save time?
-How much time do readers spend with your magazine? Your Web site? Your events?
-Do some kinds of readers spend more time with your magazine than others?
-How much time do your readers spend with media in general?
-What other activities do your readers engage in while reading your magazine?
-Do your readers spend their time differently than other people with similar demographics?
-How do you help your readers save time?
-Do your advertisers have products or services that save customers time?
-Based on what you know, how much of your advertisers’ money is wasted by CME?
-How long do your advertisers’ campaigns run?
-How long is the purchase cycle for your advertisers’ products?
-Where do your advertisers get the longest exposure for their ads?
-How do your advertisers hold their customers’ time
Here are links to some of the studies we’ve referred to:
Trend data from the Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast is included in Table 1110 of the 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States. Some data has been updated since this article was completed in January, 2008.