[ Fall/Winter 2008 ]
POV: Market Research in the First Person
Digital Realities
By Martin Zagorsek, EVP
As a subscriber to many marketing and media-related news feeds, my inbox is inundated with articles hyping the latest trends in new media. In the most recent (in The New York Times)1, the author proudly stated that she no longer had a TV in her house and now happily watches all of her favorite network shows online on her laptop – implying of course that this is the way of the future. Other articles claim that "nobody" buys CDs (Advertising Age)2 anymore, blogs are "dead" (Wired) and Twitter3 is the way of the future; even The Economist4 recently said that social networking is so ubiquitous it is becoming the new Web.
Living in New York, or San Francisco, or Seattle, or any of the other metropolitan bubbles that house the majority of new media professionals makes it easy to believe such hyperbole. It's even easier when it's supported by statistics issued by analysts who have a vested interest in fanning the hype in order to sell their content, and are willing to use biased data to support their angle. I recently read one research company release that said 41 percent of baby boomer Internet users had visited a social network, and had done so an average of 8 times in the past 3 months; but it neglects to mention that its "sample" is made up of Internet users who signed themselves up to a panel to take Internet surveys.
Researching your target customers' online behaviors using volunteer Internet panelists is like polling people in bars and concluding that everybody drinks a lot of alcohol. Relying on your personal experiences and those of your friends as an indicator is worse – I live in Manhattan and have not owned a car in years, neither do the majority of my friends. Cars are dead! Who drives anymore? A few years from now, everybody will be taking subways and taxis when they're not riding bicycles, right?
For new media pundits and the trade publications that provide them their platform, such exaggerations are useful, and for many others in the industry they are entertaining at worst. But for marketers trying to spend their shrinking budgets to reach their message-saturated, fragmented, fickle target consumers, they're quite dangerous. New media are here to stay and reaching a growing portion of the population. However the digital divide is real, and it too is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. The percentage of households with Internet connections has plateaued at around 70 percent in recent years, and over 10 percent of U.S. households still use a simple antenna to receive their TV signal, rather than cable or a satellite dish. DVR ownership stands at barely a quarter of households, and not all of them even use it regularly.
The difference between hype and reality is the difference between wasting your budget chasing mirages and connecting with your consumers in the media they're actually using. Statistically rigorous data sources such as Knowledge Networks' MultiMedia Mentor® show that many of the most-hyped new media are far from the ubiquitous phenomena pundits would have us believe. Internet use overall is indeed widespread, though older people (50-64) only spend about half as much time using it as 18 to 24 year olds. Within that, email usage is relatively common at all ages, but social networks remain the province of the young, with very little time spent on them by those over 35. If you're a brand trying to engage college students or young professionals, building a presence on Facebook makes perfect sense; but if your product is targeted at baby boomers, remember that they still read newspapers and watch more TV than anyone else.
In better economic times it was easier to get away with less-focused spending, and in fact it made a certain amount of sense to try to get ahead of the adoption curve with new media. It's often desirable for a brand (and good for marketers' careers) to be seen on the cutting edge, and there are useful things to be learned from experimentation. Two years ago many brands were setting up virtual outposts in Second Life, but now those efforts look like a waste of money. However, if that medium had gained traction (and it may yet do so), those marketers would have had an edge on their competitors.
But when budgets are tight and every marketing dollar is needed to fuel the core business, it becomes much more important to know where your customers are, and are not, spending their time – both online and off.
What do you think of Martin's perspective?
Let us know at know@knowledgenetworks.com.
Martin Zagorsek is Executive Vice President, ClientService. He manages KN's rapidly growing business unit serving the advertiser and media industries – including packaged goods, pharmaceutical, media content provider, and other companies. Before joining Knowledge Networks, Zagorsek oversaw NPD Group's business unit serving clients in the videogame, PC game, and software sectors. Earlier, as NPD's Director, Product Management, Zagorsek worked with top entertainment industry clients to identify new ways of providing strategic analysis across entertainment formats. Zagorsek also served as Vice President, Strategy, for YaYa Media, and was Director, Business Consulting, for Sapient Corporation from 1998 to 2002.
Footnotes:
1 "Who Needs a TV? I'm Watching on a Laptop," by Laura M. Holson, The New York Times, Dec. 3, 2008 (www.nytimes.com)
2 "Five Years From Now, Media Will Be Totally Intangible," by Steve Rubel, Advertising Age, Dec. 1, 2008 (www.adage.com)
3 "Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004," by Paul Boutin, Wired, Oct. 20, 2008 (www.wired.com)
4 "Online Social Networks: Everywhere and Nowhere," [no author], The Economist, May 19, 2008 (www.economist.com)
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