We’ve fallen in love with our hand-held little screens, unless we’re playing Angry Bird of course!
The fact of the matter is we’re all in love… 86% international mobile internet users are using their devices whilst watching TV. TV has to a large extent become that distant ‘ex’ that we have to tolerate because we have offspring, but really only want contact with when there is nothing else to do.
So let us understand what love is [with a little help from thefreedictionary.com].
• A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness
• A feeling of intense attraction
• An intense emotional attachment for a treasured object
• An expression of one’s affection: A strong predilection or enthusiasm and it is an object of such an enthusiasm
TV used to be the first love 10 years ago, but mobi has become the love of our lives – that ONE that we have committed to. Interest in TV (big screen) is declining and it has a fraction of people’s attention, because we’re not only multitasking with multi-screens of which most are closer in proximity to us (smaller screens), but we’ve identified that device (the smallest screen) that supports our feelings of love, affection, devotion, fondness and perhaps the foolishness of infatuation. So the small things in life do matter, despite an advertiser’s attempt to let us spend more time for more ‘human’ interaction with their ‘Social Media Guard’ ad.
So next time you’re at a school cricket match, swimming gala or at an under 8 soccer match, or even at a teenager parent evening/seminar and you see moms and dads gazing at their little loves (for up to 2.35 hours at a time), be sure to know those are the mobi offspring they’re gazing or smiling at and share intense emotions with and not the little human loves we all thought of 10 or 20 years ago.
And our human offspring? Well they’re texting; U18’s internationally send and receive at least 2 779 texts per month. 65% use mobile in the school premises and 25% in class! 54% are texting, 38% are calling their friends and mothers and 69% use it for entertainment. 47% of teens’ lives would END (sigh) without their little devices.
We are surely sharing the love quite differently nowadays…and I just know the new love is not that zero score in tennis when I was down 50-LOVE to my U13 opponent in the final set and I knew it was game over.
We spend 40% of our ‘awake’ time per day with media. Of that, 30% or 113 minutes are devoted to our little devices and only 110 minutes’ affection is given to TV. According to Google, 77% of TV viewers use another device (most likely a smartphone or tablet) during TV viewing time. But it takes two to tango… so we’re multitasking. It’s fair to regard the lovers’ interaction as duplicated reach.
Marketers, on the other hand, are perving at a distance, envying the ‘lovers’. Even if mobi and online is under-read by 50%, the proportion of ad revenue to time spent per medium is going to keep lovers doing what they’re doing and marketers perving for the moment.
So why do marketers still luurvve TV so much and spend so much on it, whilst mobi is clearly the new girl to be dated? We as marketers will be forced to design several strategies to engage and break through the personal attraction which mobi offers to their lovers, to design other intentions or state of minds for audience experiences and outcomes which now count for everything. Credit to AT&T’s Networking Exchange that refers to these as customer journeys.
Funkyspacemonkey.com advises us to, “Learn where people like to use their phones most, and what moms and teens are doing with mobile devices”. We might think the norm for mobile spikes are in the morning, late afternoon and over weekends, but target markets interact differently with their loves than the norm: 77% of people use their phones in bed!
Sandra Burger is business unit manager at The MediaShop. This post was first published in the company newsletter.
