medium is no longer TV.
Back then, the UCLA Center for Communication Policy in the US found a dramatic drop in television viewing among Internet 'veterans'. No
other media - not radio, magazines, newspapers or books - suffered as pronounced a decline. And during the usual summer showing of Big
Brother, the UK's Channel 4 even launched a premium broadband service called 4Broadband. Perhaps they had a whiff of the kind of
research that was coming down the track.
This week it came. The European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), the pan-European trade organisation for sellers of interactive media, released research showing that the Internet now constitutes 10 percent of Europeans' media consumption - and the use
of traditional media is waning as a result.
The Internet came out ahead of magazines (8 percent) and just behind newspapers (13 percent) in media consumption terms. The study from leading global research agency Millward Brown showed that while TV controls the largest share of people's media time (41 percent),
nearly 45 percent of consumers watch less television as a result of
using the Internet.
Nigel Morris, President of Carat Interactive Worldwide, was happy to point out that "despite this [research], online advertising still
accounts for only 1.5% of total ad spending across Europe." And more wisely he concluded that "consumer usage of the internet is ahead of
the advertising market." Way ahead, it would appear.
The study also found:
- A higher level of consistency in European internet penetration than previously thought - France, Spain and Italy are rapidly catching up with UK and Germany
- A higher level of usage apparent with 1 in 3 European internet users surfing the net every day
- Less simultaneous media usage when surfing the net than when consuming any other media
- Over half of consumers state that the Internet is great to use when your brain is active whilst just under 60 percent claim that
- More than one in three people indicated that online advertising makes a brand more forward thinking
- Nearly 90 percent believe that there is too much advertising on TV but less than half this amount states that the same is true online
The EIAA was also quick to point out that its members (AdLINK Internet Media, AOL, Lycos Europe, MSN, Tiscali, T-Online, Yahoo!)have a combined reach of 64.7 million (82% of total) active home users across Europe (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden,
Netherlands, Switzerland).
Perhaps it's time to start marching on those media buying agencies...
From Econsultancy
