Can you hang on a minute I’m multitasking

Mobile’s are encouraging us all to multitask so says a new Nielsen/Yahoo survey on US surfing, watching and viewing behaviours, but advertising just isn’t stepping up to the mark.

We’re multi-tasking a lot, the web is now a multi-channel world, with video, audio and text, links to Twitter, Facebook, etc and we’re all happy to sit in front of the TV and email, browse the web read Facebook, so whay the hell is advertising still a standalone world? When was the last time you saw a call to the web on a TV advert or on an ad in a magazine, or the newspaper, or heaven forbid a bar code or a  QR code on an ad? We’re willing it just seems that the advertisers and the agencies aren’t. It’s all especially worrying when you look at the latest survey from Nielsen on our multi-tasking behaviour.

We’re all for surveys here at Bmob, but sometimes we get a bit worried about how independent they are. Take the latest survey conducted by Nielsen for Yahoo, the aim of the survey was to “demonstrate that media consumption patterns are shifting away from TV and other traditional media outlets.” Now shout at us if you want but isn’t that a bit biased? Surely the aim should have been to see current media trends in media use? Anyway that’s just us nitpicking.

So what did they learn in the survey? Well they learnt we all do a heck of a lot of multi-tasking, something that we think is going to become even more prevalent as more an more tablet devices like the iPad come on to the market. If the US TV Guide and the Radio Times want to survive into the next decade, then they’re both going to have to come out with an HTML 5/app version, and fast!

In the US three out of four users multi-task with TV and Internet, with 51% of them multi-tasking daily, and 90% doing it at least once per week. And they’re spending more and more time multi-tasking – as you can see from the graph on the right-

Average weekly minutes spent watching TV while surfing the net

the time spent using TV and Internet simultaneously has grown by 19% over the last year.  Predictably there are more women multitasking than men, but there’s not much in it  (73% v. 77%).

So where are they concentrating their attention when they’re doing all this multitasking? The answer is, that they’re spending more time focusing on the internet than the TV. Over half (54%) say that the Internet is the primary focus of attention, with just 16% saying that TV is the primary focus of attention.

The last question answered by the survey is are they reading related content to what they’re watching? They’re will be a lot of ad sales reps crossing their fingers at this point and screaming, “please say they are, oh please”t. Unfortunately for those cross-channel ad sales reps only 7% report their simultaneous online surfing is frequently related to the TV show or advertisement. So cancel those cross media sales campaigns now, it’s a waste of cash. Or is it? We’d say that the problem is that most TV ad campaigns are still way behind the programmes they top and tail. The programmes can’t stop telling you to “follow us on twitter” or   got to our website at www, where as the ads are strangely free of web addresses, twitter call to actions and anything else web related, even a QR code bar code might be a good idea. So the 7% isn’t exactly surprising, in fact it’s still very rare to see a paper ad that has a URL or a twitter, FaceBook group address on it.[ad name=”Google Text half banner advert “]