Some say the Internet will soon overtake King TV as broadband access becomes more and more prolific. Indeed a recent Canadian study has suggested that the gap between time spent online per week and time spent watching television is closing rapidly. Some have gone to extremes saying that television is deep trouble and advertisers should make a dramatic shift in their ad budgets. But cooler heads and other reports might suggest that the two will walk hand in hand.
However, the numbers, when taken as whole, do suggest that it is time (if you haven’t already) to reexamine how you spend your dollars. My prediction: radio and print are wheezing as if in the throes of death, and the average media consumer will become a simultaneous channel/web surfer (big leap, I know). This isn’t to say radio and print will go away, but will become quaint old-world media for the technophobes.
The Canadian study, conducted by Ipsos Reid, shows that Internet usage among Canadians is up 46% since 2002, averaging 12.7 hours per week, up from 8.7 hours per week. While the average television viewing is still slightly above (about 2 hours a day), experts are saying that people are watching less TV and moving toward the Internet, especially as broadband begins to reach the majority of homes.
This is echoed in the states as well. Recent figures are showing that broadband Internet users watch just 12 hours of TV per week compared to 14 hours per week those offline.
But a more levelheaded prognostication will determine that TV is not on the way out. Rather broadcast will become a partner or supplement to web surfing as Universal McCann reported that simultaneous TV viewing and Internet use soared in the States, jumping from 174 simultaneous minutes in 2001 to 300 simultaneous minutes in 2004.
This makes more sense to me as, presumably, you can look at your own behavior at times as an indicator of the norm. My down time at home, with the advent of wireless routers and WiFi-enabled notebooks, has found me plopped on the couch Mozilla Firefox Stumbling along while chuckling at the latest irreverent humor on South Park.
What does this mean for the e-marketer? It means that campaigns should be adjusted to reflect what their audiences are doing. As the Internet takes a growing portion of all ad revenue, the smart marketer knows that taking away from TV is a mistake. Budgets should be divided in the future to better accommodate the two-timer, attention deficit browser of the future.
The short and skinny of it, as Jim Kite, executive VP and global research director at Universal McCann says, is to create a multi channel campaign, building “imagery into their television ads referring viewers to the Internet to impart more detailed information.”
This could be yet another support for the raining “content, content, content” theory of web page development.
