by Media Optimiser
O. Gaywood
O. Gaywood
Recent research shadowing the behaviour of American adults has revealed that they averaged out spending more than eight hours a day in front of a screen (be it television, computer, mobile or GPS) and they are exposed to 61 minutes of adverts and promotions daily. Television remains the number one area for media advertising, but the research undertaken by the Council for Research Excellence showed that computer usage has overtaken radio as the second most used media stream, with print in fourth place.
Researchers - looking to see if companies should be looking for new ways of media measurement - state that theirs is the largest ever observation of media usage. Previously many studies simply recorded what participants remembered of their days, but the 350 subjects in this study had their actions captured in real time for 952 days.
Of the subjects (all 18 or older), researchers found that every age group spent almost the same time period consuming media, apart from 45-54-year-olds who spent around an hour more in front of screens each day. This flies in the face of previous assumptions that younger generations spent more time with screen-based media and also that they multitask more than older people - people in their 20s through to their early 50s all showed the same tendency to multitask, with only people older than 55 showing any signs of a generation gap.
Youngsters (18-24) in the study watched the least television (3.5 hours a day) but spent the most time texting people (29 minutes a day) and watching videos online (5.5 minutes a day).
