Social Media as One Medium to Consider in Media Planning
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Oct 05, 2009
At the AMA MRC conference, Mike Hess, Carat.com's EVP of Research, Marketing Science & Consumer Insights, shared data from the Never Ending Friending study and covered social media as a medium and its implications on research.
Current Climate: Economic and Media - Economy has dropped from a concern of 65% of Americans in March to 40% in August, though it remains the number-one issue, with health care in second place. Despite the recession, households are not downgrading from cable/satellite to broadcast.
Media Touchpoints - Media touchpoints have risen from six types of media in the 1980s to 26-36 today (e.g., radio, TV, magazine, email marketing, social networks, keyword search). The "first screen" is the TV (live, DVR, video games), the second screen is the Web, the third screen is the mobile device, and the fourth screen is all others (e.g., kiosks). TV remains the 800-pound gorilla of media, despite declining hours among the young. People spend 8.5 hours per day on media: 65+ spend that at least 10 minutes a day on five media touchpoints; 18-24 year olds spend at least 10 minutes on 10 media touchpoints.
Social Networks - From broadcasters to "mycasters": social networking has gone mainstream, as people choose who to receive information from. In the U.S., 72% of online users participate in social networking; as a result, 56.3% of ad agencies realistically intend to purchase ads on social networking. After declining from $1.18B to $1.14B annual spending in 2009, social-network spending will resume growing next year. Social media is used for self-expression, discovery and interaction. Social networking sites are the preferred free-time activity, cited by 17% of respondents. As a result, social networking is crowding out traditional behavior; social network users watch less TV and read fewer magazines and newspapers. Social networks providing new opportunities for research: instead of doing a focus group, Mike "scraped" online communities for content about tuna, finding extensive discussions on diet/weight management websites (as well as online communities as far afield as a Star Trek fan site).
Navigating the Media Landscape (BOE) - Media can be bought, owned or earned: bought media is traditional advertising, owned media is packaging and your web site, and earned media is word of mouth, viral sharing, social chatter, press and organic search. Earned media is when your brand is talked about by consumers, when your brand listens to and feeds conversations.
Maintaining Neutrality in Planning: Tools/Cases - To help an organization improve communication to the Hispanic market segment, Carat conducted a psychographic segmentation to come up with two Hispanic consumer segments in this marketplace: a "Healthy & Financially Fit" segment (also digitally savvy) and a "Sedentary Indulgers" segment. This segmentation was then applied to media demographics to select the best media to target.
Given the profusion of media touchpoints, the next decade in advertising will be as much an era of testing as modeling.