New data emerging from a year-long study has revealed that consumers swap devices an average of 21 times in an hour when at home, highlighting new patterns in the ways that brands can garner their attention.
New data emerging from a year-long study has revealed that consumers swap devices an average of 21 times in an hour when at home, highlighting new patterns in the ways that brands can garner their attention.
The second phase of OMD UK’s ‘Future of Britain’ study, which looks at the evolution of British consumerism, included analysing how 200 people in a study used their devices during 60 mins of an average evening, and found they changed between mobiles, tablets and laptops quickly and fluidly, especially during a TV break. Despite swapping their attention from devices throughout this time, 95% still had TV on for the whole hour.
Chris Worrell, an insight director at OMD, told Media Week: “We were quite surprised, and I think the respondents were surprised as well. Not only were they multitasking, but we were surprised at the sheer number of times that they were flip-flopping from one device to another.
“Most people would have the TV on for the whole one-hour period, but they would then use their phone, then go to the laptop, then back to the phone, and so on.”
The research highlights the decreasing attention spans of the average consumer, and perhaps suggests that brands looking to engage with digital customers should experiment with shorter ad formats, veering away from the longer traditional 30-second ads.
Worrell agreed, continuing: “We think brands need to experiment with new formats that fit with these new consumption patterns. Things like skippable ads on YouTube are almost priming people to expect that after the first five seconds of an ad, you can choose to stay with it or move on.
“That’s why we’re seeing such growth in sponsorship on television; it’s a new format that can engage with people in that kind of time period.”
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