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Retail Industry

Move Over, Prime-Time!

American Demographics, July 1, 2004 by Noan Rubin Brier

Byline: NOAH RUBIN BRIER

Consider a scenario: Spring 2012 rolls around. Cherry blossoms, mud puddles and, yes, like it or not, some semblance of an upfront television marketplace. In this scenario, television's numbers - still in the billions of dollars - are languishing, but other media are in the mix to pick up the slack. "Dayparts," as they formerly existed, are, well, different. Internet advertising surges, largely thanks to increased spending to reach people online at work, especially young adults. Fueling this spending increase are not only online investment companies, software concerns and office products marketers, but traditional consumer goods marketers selling packaged goods products like cheese and cereal. In the footsteps of fast-food restaurants and beer companies, masters of tactical media planning who focus on specific times of the day for their marketing, nearly every type of consumer goods and services company buys into this at-work daypart. Marketing to the at-work online audience has exploded.

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Why is 2012 a magic number? That year, the last of Generation Y hits the ripe young age of 18, and, factoring in current workforce and occupational trends, about 19 million 18- to 34-year-olds - a group roughly equivalent to the entire population of Australia - will be using computers at work to access the Internet, and advertisers cannot ignore them. This market of 19 million will bring media savvy, skepticism about advertising and an affinity for multitasking out of their bedrooms and dorm rooms and into the office with them.

At home, they will be harder than ever to reach during prime-time, not that they aren't hard to reach today. The 18- to 34-year-old group watches nearly an hour less of prime-time television than the household average, according to Nielsen Media Research. And, there are no signs that point to a reversal in this trend. Prime-time, the 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. hours that millions of people have faithfully devoted their evenings to viewing sitcoms, adventures, news shows and reality programs for the past four decades, is a rapidly eroding economic concept as new lifestyles and attitudes seem to be colliding head on with old life stages and habits. As more Gen Ys enter the 18-to-34 age group, we expect even more of a drop in their prime-time consumption as they continue to instant message friends, surf the Internet and game away hours, night and day.

All scenarios aside, a serious case can be made today for the workplace and work time as one of the biggest emerging "dayparts" for marketers and their media planners to wrestle with, especially as demographics play out and the mass of the new generation passes across to young adulthood. This has major ramifications, not only for the currency of 30-second prime-time TV spots, but on business-to-business channels, place-based media and events occurring on-site where people work. Even as the flashpoint lies somewhere in the years ahead in terms of how Gen Y will impact "marketing to adult consumers," distinctly different media consumption patterns among young adults have already begun to change the very province of media. At the same time, those different media consumption patterns raise the stakes in finding efficient channels and effective moments to convey marketing messages.

For instance, 18- to 34-year-old at-work Internet users see personal use at work as a right, not a privilege. Almost half of them use workplace Internet access for personal activities "all the time or often." This contrasts with the 55 and over at-work users, who responded "all the time or often" at a rate of only 32 percent. This data comes from a survey fielded in late June by comScore Survey Research, a division of the Internet audience measurement firm comScore Networks Inc., exclusively for American Demographics. Thirty-four percent of 18- to 34-year-olds believe that the Internet "allows employees to spend more time at the workplace because they do not have to leave to take care of as many personal needs." Meanwhile, 32.5 percent believe that it "allows employees to more efficiently take care of time-consuming personal tasks." Gen Y sees Internet use at work far differently than those who are older, i.e. not as "counter" to productivity, but as contributing to it. This age group doesn't view at-work and at-home Internet access as being a whole lot different from each other.

What's more, comScore Survey Research and American Demographics asked respondents to rank how acceptable 14 different personal Internet activities were at work, from "reading news online" to "keeping up with sports online" and all the way to "visiting pornography sites." In all except two categories, 18- to 34-year-olds found personal online activities to be acceptable. Almost without fail, older respondents deemed personal activities to be less acceptable. Even an activity as common as "reading news online" found older Internet users less accepting than younger ones. It's worth noting that this portion of the comScore Survey Research-American Demographics survey measured attitudes toward personal Internet activities, not actual consumption.

Retail Industry

Move Over, Prime-Time!

American Demographics, July 1, 2004 by Noan Rubin Brier

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