Over the next 20 years, Americans who are now 18-34 are going to mature into the most powerful segment in the US population. It’s widely acknowledged that an unusually high proportion of this segment are suffering from anxiety, depression, attention problems, low self-esteem, social awkwardness, hopelessness, a dim view of the future, and a sense of the meaninglessness of life.
The recent book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt traces the causes to the smartphone and the currently dominant version of social media. Jonathan finds that the replacement of play in the real world by these specific media types has made young people especially those 11-14 undergoing puberty more likely to become conformists and emulators of people who have prestige within the social media domain who are not in the classical sense great role models… with lasting effects into adulthood.
As I reported in a MediaVillage article last July, a new social media platform WeAre8 is attempting to overturn the first generation of social media platforms, using AI to eliminate put-downs, hate, shaming, and bullying.
Taking the opportunity offered by my consultancy for Nielsen, I felt it would be useful to you for me to publish a bit of the data that Nielsen’s Peter Katsingris compiles every quarter. In this post I’ll contrast the use of electronic media by 18-34 vs. the other adult age groups in the USA.
For example, let’s contrast the 18-34 segment with its cognitive and affective challenges, with the ruling generation which is largely 50-64 in terms of who is running the big corporations. The electronic media consumption by 18-34 in its total volume is less than two-thirds of the amount of time 50–64-year-olds spend with electronic media. We hope this is a sign that these youngsters are consciously spending as much time as possible in the real world rather than the virtual world.
The share of time spent with digital across all devices (TV sets, smartphones, tablets) is 53% for 18-34 and 28% for 50-64.
The command cohort 50-64 still spends more than 4.5 hours a day of live television, versus less than a half hour a day of live TV for 18-34. This is the biggest difference between the two age groups in terms of electronic media usage.
The pattern stands out quite clearly when comparing the four age groups: live TV usage increases stepwise as one grows older.
What could account for the apparent 18-34 abandonment of what had been the hero media type for so long?
I asked the right questions, and Nielsen was able to answer them. I was surprised and happy at the findings. 18-34 has not abandoned television/video. 18-34 is actually spending more time with television/video than it did in 1992. (I asked Peter Katsingris for the earliest date he could report on without a heavy lift.)
In May of 1992 the total number of hours per week spent watching TV in the U.S. was 24 hours and 30 minutes. Today the comparable figure is 25 hours and 35 minutes.
The reason it is invisible in the graph above is that the latter graph created by the quarterly trending study covers only the in-home usage and it doesn’t break out the video parts of usage of computers, smartphones and tablets. Here is what the picture looks like based upon the special tabulation Peter agreed to do for me:
Of course, back in 1992 there was no viewing of video on computers, smartphones or tablets, and the level of out of home viewing was quite low (about 2-3% except for sports) and was picked up by meters as visitor viewing.
So, 18-34 is not anti-TV/video. They are spending good chunks of time with it, it’s just in lots of places that must be added together accurately, which is obviously not easy.
Some of that video is shortform, and Nielsen also has those figures. But some of what is on shortform video is now getting better and could be picked up by grownup TV companies. Longform currently has higher ROAS than shortform more as a result of the skip button countdown than based on the quality of the content, although most of the shortform content still has a long way to go to catch up in terms of openness to emotional immersion in ads that most TV contexts create.
Note that 18-34 is still the heaviest consumer of videogames in terms of time spent vs. all other adult age groups, spending more than twice as much time as 18+ playing games on a game console. If that use of TV set were added on to the figures above it would bring the 18-34 total weekly hours to over 28. (Nielsen)
Also note that 18-34 is also the heaviest consumer of social networking in terms of time spent vs. any other adult age group: 8 hours 53 minutes per week. 91% of it is on smartphones, the rest on computers and tablets. (Nielsen)
How can TV content be made more attractive to 18-34?
First of all, don’t expect to be able to vastly increase the 18-34 time spent with TV, it is actually already quite high. They need the rest of the time for school, work, play, sex, videogames, sleep, eating, etc.
What you can shift is you can capture a higher share from away from shortforms, and probably also from social media as it is today (causing stress more than fun).
Quibi tried a logical approach: shortforms of premium content. It did not work. Perhaps it needed more time or better marketing to wear it in.
Another approach which should be tested is serialized comedrama where new shortform episodes come out almost daily, and not on any fixed schedule.
Big TV can also work with amateur talent that shows promise as creators/influencers and/or youth sports stars, bands, etc., creating new formats of every length and cadence, and including interactivity as much as possible. Every smartphone is a video camera. Time to get creative. That should be a cause for great excitement.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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