Captive Audiences Set Free
Today, Americans are consuming about 12 hours of media every day, and the time spent between traditional versus digital media is surprisingly even. 6 hours are spent with traditional media, and 6.25 hours are spent with digital media.
That’s where things start to get interesting.
The 12 hour media diet really depends on age. Older consumers tend to spend a greater share of those 12 hours with traditional media, while younger consumers dedicate a greater percentage of those 12 hours to digital media.
This was the first year eMarketer’s been measuring such behavior in which digital media has surpassed traditional (6.25 hours vs. 6 hours), albeit by a marginal amount. That trend, however, is only going to continue. Digital will overtake media consumption, and marketers will need to shift with the trend.
The Prevalence of Choice
The biggest evolution marketers have to contend with all of this is the growing pervasiveness of choice. Today, marketers can count on captive audiences in fewer and fewer instances.
Attention is no longer the price for content. People don’t have to watch the commercials. They can either skip ad content or ignore it by playing on their phones during commercial breaks. That's as true for any medium as it is for TV.
Attention is not a given, and marketers can’t take it for granted. It must be earned with every action a brand takes and every message a brand puts out into the world, because, while it is never given, attention can still be earned.