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 won't find the answer in MRI, Simmons, Nielsen or any other major industry media research source.

Our 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 nowhere.

For example, how many marketers still didn't 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, wasn't an issue until quite recently; or to this day may never have heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, arguably the Paul Revere of the social marketing revolution.

In 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 follows:

…the experiences of childhood, especially in teenage years, impact the shape and course of later life… That is, the way media and marketing communications are learned during childhood determines the patterns for the rest of one's life, even though new media and technologies appear…Boomersuse the Internet, but they use it differently than doMillennialswho 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 20^th century – TV computer and mobile phone – aka the three screens, we can unravel how each screen engages the various functions within our brain.

Neuromarketing proves thethree screens of TV, computer and mobile phone are handled by the brain in quite different ways, ways that consumers cannot necessarily identify themselves. Our brain's 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 we're all aware, starts to engage at about 500 thousandths of second and beyond.

At a recent Advertising Research Foundation meeting, Dr A.K. Pradeep of Neurofocus, a leading neuromarketing research agency, isolated the essential differences in how the three types of screen communicate. By scrutinizing consumers' precognitive responses, the responses before conscious thinking fully engages, Dr Pradeep was able to demonstrate the relative communications strengths of each channel:

• TV is superior for emotion and action
• Computer online is better for dynamic content and personal or private communications
• Mobile is excellent at helping drive memory

Part of the strength of TV and computer screens is that their larger size helps draw out "human elements and fine details." By contrast, mobile's smaller screen demands an intensity of focus which can result "in a significant boost in memory retention."

So if we can largely explain our innate media habits by the phrase Youare what you grew up with,why aren't we following this principle more assiduously in our industry media research? The main studies of both MRI and Simmons don't track under 18s, so emerging media trends could still be missed. Even the groundbreaking Nielsen-sponsored Video Consumer Mapping Study, which looked at the consumer's use of all three screens in great detail, didn't 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 12.

Shouldn't the USA be quicker to embrace teenager-driven insights into burgeoning multimedia trends?

Graeme is SVP, Director of Consumer Insights & 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 platform--from TV to chat rooms--which informs the efforts of Universal McCann and its agency partners. Graeme can be reached at Graeme.hutton@umww.com

Read all Graeme's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Curious Thoughts from Curious Minds - MediaBizBloggers.

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