UM: You Are What You Grew Up With - Graeme Hutton - MediaBizBloggers

Has your curiosity ever led you to question why we consume the media in the way we do For example why does someone decide to watch TV for a whole evening rather than curl up by the fire and read a good book Or for that matter why would a consumer decide to undertake either of these two pursuits instead of enjoying a magazine a radio program or streaming video Underlying these questions is the fundamental motivational principle that affects the consumption of all media channels It underpins the media ecology that helps shape each of our professional lives Yet we won39t find the answer in MRI Simmons Nielsen or any other major industry media research sourceOur media consumption patterns may be known in microscopic detail but the motivations behind those patterns are largely assumed This assumption results in the overlooking of small shifts in our aggregate media consumption patterns each year Over time these shifts can cascade into an avalanche of change that seems to come from nowhereFor example how many marketers still didn39t know what blogs were three or four years after the term was first used in 1999 or thought Twitter created in 2006 and which at time of writing is at over 14 billion tweets wasn39t an issue until quite recently or to this day may never have heard of Gary Vaynerchuk arguably the Paul Revere of the social marketing revolutionIn their monograph Media Generations Professors Block and Shultz of Northwestern University posited the view that our primary media habits are predominantly shaped by the media we experience at an early age They encapsulated this in the phrase You are what you grew up with They expanded on the idea as followsamp8230the experiences of childhood especially in teenage years impact the shape and course of later lifeamp8230 That is the way media and marketing communications are learned during childhood determines the patterns for the rest of one39s life even though new media and technologies appearamp8230 Boomers use the Internet but they use it differently than do Millennials who grew up with it The notion that exposure to a medium at an early age leads to an innate familiarity with that channel makes eminent sense Yet our implicit literacy of a medium probably stretches beyond our simply being immersed in that channel at an early age Focusing on the three mass media that have emerged since the middle of the 20th century amp8211 TV computer and mobile phone amp8211 aka the three screens we can unravel how each screen engages the various functions within our brainNeuromarketing proves the three screens of TV computer and mobile phone are handled by the brain in quite different ways ways that consumers cannot necessarily identify themselves Our brain39s ability to process an experience is far more advanced than our ability to verbalize that experience Neuromarketing reveals our brain processes an event at 300 to 500 thousandths of second after the experience whereas as our conscious brain the thinking of which we39re all aware starts to engage at about 500 thousandths of second and beyondAt a recent Advertising Research Foundation meeting Dr AK Pradeep of Neurofocus a leading neuromarketing research agency isolated the essential differences in how the three types of screen communicate By scrutinizing consumers39 precognitive responses the responses before conscious thinking fully engages Dr Pradeep was able to demonstrate the relative communications strengths of each channelTV is superior for emotion and actionComputer online is better for dynamic content and personal or private communicationsMobile is excellent at helping drive memoryPart of the strength of TV and computer screens is that their larger size helps draw out quothuman elements and fine detailsquot By contrast mobile39s smaller screen demands an intensity of focus which can result quotin a significant boost in memory retentionquotSo if we can largely explain our innate media habits by the phrase You are what you grew up with why aren39t we following this principle more assiduously in our industry media research The main studies of both MRI and Simmons don39t track under 18s so emerging media trends could still be missed Even the groundbreaking Nielsensponsored Video Consumer Mapping Study which looked at the consumer39s use of all three screens in great detail didn39t include teenagers In contrast Target Group Index the major international multimedia study available in over 60 countries routinely surveys individuals aged 15 and over and in some countries as young as 12Shouldn39t the USA be quicker to embrace teenagerdriven insights into burgeoning multimedia trendsGraeme is SVP Director of Consumer Insights ampamp Research Graeme is responsible for ensuring that all appropriate proprietary and syndicated research tools and resources are applied in the development of consumer insight strategies for a total communications research platformfrom TV to chat roomswhich informs the efforts of Universal McCann and its agency partners Graeme can be reached at GraemehuttonumwwcomRead all Graeme39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Curious Thoughts from Curious Minds MediaBizBloggersCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBlogger

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