Study Reveals Media Pros Have Digital Media Bias (And Explains WhyYou’re Probably Reading This Via Email)
MediaPost
Madison Avenue, directly or indirectly, allocates nearly a trillion dollars in advertising budgets to influence consumers via media — but how much do the personal media habits and interests of industry pros influence the media they use to do that? It’s an old question that is taking on new impetus in the age of hyper-accelerated digital media change, and some new research indicates that the personal media habits of industry pros aren’t anything like that of the consumers they are charged with influencing.
The research, which was presented by the Media Behavior Institute Thursday night during MPG’s Collaborative Alliance session during Advertising Week, indicates that media pros are much more likely to be heavy users of digital media — particularly mobile and social — and are much less likely to use traditional media such as TV and radio than average consumers.
The study, which utilized a mobile app-based diary that a small, non-projectable sample of industry executives used to self-report their media usage during one day in their working life, compared their behavior with MBI’s ongoing USA TouchPoints study, which captures the same daily usage data among the general consumer population for 10-day periods.
While the data is based on a small sample, the findings are striking, because the media pros reporting were so dramatically different than average consumers — especially when it came to their use of Internet-connected computers and mobile devices.
Amazingly, the media pros spent 53% of their waking day interacting with email, versus 20% for the general population, and they spent 28% accessing the Internet versus 15% for average consumers. Their use of mobile apps and social networks was similarly distorted, which may go a long way toward explaining Madison Avenue’s obsession with those media platforms.
