The new consumption

The current phase of change in how we consume media is characterised by a number of trends. Some of these originate from the consumer, some from business; all are linked.

The sheer number of media outlets available has had a fragmentary effect on traditional mass media channels, especially TV. But it’s not just that people have more choice; they are increasingly consuming more than one medium at once. Known as media meshing, this is characterised by a blurring of the boundaries between activities and the channel or platform.

Examples include watching TV while surfing the internet; listening to music or watching videos downloaded on a mobile phone; or streaming radio through the internet and simultaneously chatting with friends through an instant message service. These habits can lead to attention deficit or even media saturation, where consumers are being bombarded with so many messages that each loses its efficiency.

Media meshing also means it is harder to reach consumers. In 1995 it took three TV ads to reach 80% of women in the US. By 2000 it took 97. Mass media, while unrivalled in its impact in some situations, no longer provides a de facto scale of audience.

The internet – whether accessed by a static or mobile device – stands and falls by its ability to enable people to interact. Allowing the consumer to tailor information requests, search for products or experiences or play with others online has contributed to its first phase of growth. Fast broadband connections now combine swift download speeds with ‘always-on’ connectivity. It is the latter which is driving the internet’s next phase of development.

Communities, blogs, forums, social networks and contributions from ‘amateur’ users within the new generation of sites have been dubbed ‘web 2.0’ by many industry observers. It is predicted that this type of activity will grow to be at least one-half of all internet-based content consumption over the next ten years, up from 30% in 2006.

In 2007, social networking went through exponential growth, particularly in the UK and Europe. Consumers use these online sites to augment their offline social lives, interacting with their existing friends and using them as a tool to find other like-minded people. Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are interactive communities, not audiences in the traditional sense, and have grown fast over the last 12 months. In December 2007, one visit in 50 from a UK internet user was to Facebook.

But this space is tricky for advertisers, even for a simple display campaign. Content is unregulated and unmonitored, potentially leaving brands vulnerable to negative brand associations. Above all, though, media owners have to be careful not to exploit communities, as Facebook found with its Beacon application, which collected data on users’ shopping habits to pass onto their friends. This caused a significant backlash and accusations of invading privacy when it launched.

Done well, however, marketing in this way – either through existing sites or by creating a unique social network – can be very effective. A 2007 Aegis Media campaign for Reebok put social networking at the heart of an initiative to change the perception of the brand amongst runners. Run Easy was designed to focus on the enjoyment in running. The campaign’s site, www.goruneasy.com, offered forums, applications for creating a map of favourite run routes, playlists of running tunes and upload photos.

Online, publishing is no longer limited to businesses with a printing press or broadcasting licence. Anyone can put a written word, an image or a video into the public domain for all to see: making communications much more transparent and empowering for individuals.

As a result, there has been an explosion in the number of people who ‘create content’ online: more than half of online teens in the US are reputed to be content creators. Consumers are contributing to, and sometimes leading, the agenda for news, opinion, comment and interpretation of everything from individuals to brands.

The statistics speak for themselves. A new weblog – an online journal or commentary – is created every second of every day. Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has 9.25 million articles in 253 languages. Google’s video sharing site YouTube serves upwards of 30 million videos a day and photo-sharing portal Flickr had 43 million unique users globally in January 2008.

This activity is led by the young. As fig.1 shows, over a third of young European consumers online are creating digital or internet content, whilst more than half are ‘criticising’ or participating in discussions about an opinion or a news story.

Over 50% of users say they search online at least once a day (fig. 3). Search engines have partly or wholly taken over from a number of important offline behaviours. Trawling the high street for a new item of clothing or present for a friend; buying a newspaper; researching an essay or potential new employer; visiting a travel agent can be replaced by a visit to a search engine. As a result, they have become a powerful marketing tool. Search engines are now cited in research as the single greatest source of influence when making a purchasing decision online (fig. 4).

But what impact will these behaviours have for those seeking to understand changing consumer behaviour? What opportunities and what threats do they present? And how are they redefining the media landscape?

With search acting as the gateway for so many online and offline actions it is increasingly the key to the way media is planned, and the source of reliable, real-time, predictable data. Outlined next is how this will affect the media landscape of the future.

Search advertising will make up around 43% of digital marketing spend in 2008. The big search engines, dominated by Google, are already in hot pursuit of the next generation of search tools. While website search results are already sorted by relevance (according to how many other pages link to and from them) there are further developments in the pipeline. Personalisation will require signing in to an engine, so it can record your search preferences. This will enable the engine to factor in your location, age and gender and ‘learn’ your likes and dislikes, delivering better results.

Searching video is also a work in progress. At the moment, word tags are attached to a video allowing it to be categorised. This is only really suitable for very short clips. Since videos are both visual and audio – and could be feature-length films – indexing is complex. With six in 10 US internet users watching online video content every week, being able to index audio-visual content is crucial for the growth of the online TV market and the advertising that will help to fund it.

Due to its influence on and by other media consumption, marketers are increasingly looking to put search at the heart of their planning strategy. Some agencies are devising tools which allow measurement of the impact of each medium on a consumer’s search behaviour in real-time alongside the impact of each medium on each other. Since an individual’s behaviours work as a mix across many different media, this is a necessary and welcome route for improving planning, measurement and return on investment for a marketing initiative.