There’s a lot of talk about an impending death of “traditional media” but The Nielsen Company just released a report that shows otherwise. In order to predict the future, Nielsen looked at those who are our future adults: Teenagers. And in addition to finding that Teens are watching more TV than ever before, their use of the web is not what we, as marketers, might have suspected.
Because of the fact that Teens spend most of their days in the classroom, extracurricular activities, weekend sports, etc., they are simply not in front of computers like adults in their offices – So their time spent surfing the web is actually considerably less than adults (about 50% less).
The gem in the report is the affirmation that one of the best ways for marketers to reach the teen demographic is through mobile/portable content. Some interesting insights:
- 77% of teens directly own a mobile phone
- Teen texting over the past 2 years increased 566%.
- 66% of teens prefer texting over talking on their phone
- Teens send/receive an average of 2899 texts/month
- Teens ARE they early adopters of all mobile media
- Teens watch more mobile video than the average user
- #1 source of video content is music-related
I’ll often quote digital marketer Mitch Joel when he talks about the choice of new/emerging media versus traditional media in that “it’s not either/or, it’s in addition to.” And Nielson clearly agrees, “Teens embrace new media not at the cost of traditional media, but in supplement to it.”
I continue to believe when looking at the future of media, that it’s not so much whether certain kinds of media are dying off but how they’re evolving/adapting given the fundamental changes and options for distribution. And it’s no secret that I very much see a “media converged” future where Web and TV are one in the same and our “mobile device” will harmoniously extend our content consumption/interaction in a portable format – and in the end, content is content regardless of what mechanism we use to consume it.
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