Teens and Technology 2013

Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project and the Berkman Center for Internet and; Technology have jut released their 2013 report on Teens and Technology. Read the whole 19-page report or remain blogbound with the summary here: 

Overview

Smartphone adoption among American teens has increased substantially and mobile access to the internet is pervasive. One in four teens are “cell-mostly” internet users, who say they mostly go online using their phone and not using some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer.
These are among the new findings from a nationally representative Pew Research Center survey that explored technology use among 802 youth ages 12-17 and their parents. Key findings include:

• 78% of teens now have a cell phone, and almost half (47%) of them own smartphones. That translates into 37% of all teens who have smartphones, up from just 23% in 2011.
• 23% of teens have a tablet computer, a level comparable to the general adult population.
• 95% of teens use the internet.
• 93% of teens have a computer or have access to one at home. Seven in ten (71%) teens with home computer access say the laptop or desktop they use most often is one they share with other family members.

“The nature of teens’ internet use has transformed dramatically — from stationary connections tied to shared desktops in the home to always-on connections that move with them throughout the day,” said Mary Madden, Senior Researcher for the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and co-author of the report. “In many ways, teens represent the leading edge of mobile connectivity, and the patterns of their technology use often signal future changes in the adult population.”

New at Penn: WARC

Penn Libraries has recently added WARC to its rich collection of business intelligence resources. WARC is an international marketing database that includes over 6,000 marketing case studies as well as trend analysis, research reports, and other business intelligence information,  For media industry researchers it is chock full of useful and timely reports and data.

WARC stands for World Advertising Research Center. It has been around since 1985 and is also the publisher of International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research and International Journal of Market Research (available from the Penn Libraries e-resources). If you do literature searches on media effects, persuasion, or communication campaigns it is not unusual to pull up articles in the advertising and marketing realm in journals such as these. Let's just say these folks care about persuasion like nobody's business (pun intended).

WARC's Data section contains advertising expenditure data from 80 global markets, a comparison of global media costs (compare costs by market, medium, target audience and time period), Adspend forecasts for 12 key countries, and a wide range of media usage statistic, including TV viewing data from over 70 countries and time spent by media comparisons (television, radio, internet, newspapers, magazines and cinema) in 10 non-US markets.

WARC's Topic section is useful for sifting out soft drink and automotive reports from reports in Media and Entertainment, or Telecoms, to mention the categories of most interest to communication researchers. 

The Industry Trends section has a Media/Tech category where you can find such articles as Cloud Gaming: What the End of the Console Means for Gamers, Brands and the Global Gaming Industry (August 2012). 

Featuring EMarketer

Looking for detailed digital media usage data?  Think outside the Nieslsen box (that is usually closed and taped up at the seams, at least to academics).  EMarketer is a great source that aggregates, filters, and organizes data on e-commerce, digital marketing and media from over 4,000 global sources. Its reports cover all aspects of the market with overviews, insights and analysis. Besides going to eMarketer for specific data or that perfect report on Social Media Measurement, you might want to beome a daily reader of The eMarketer Blog. If you think about it, no one is more interested in media usage trends than advertisers so even if the advertising angle is not what you're after, this is fertile ground for digital use data in the United States and around the world. 

Media Consumption Data from Nielsen

From Nielsen, a report on media consumption in the home and on the go.

State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report

Almost one in three U.S. TV households – 35.9 million – owns four or more televisions, according to a new report on media usage from Nielsen. Across the ever-changing U.S. media landscape, TV maintains its stronghold as the most popular device, with 290 million Americans and 114.7 households owning at least one. In contrast, 211 million Americans are online and 116 million (ages 13+) access the mobile Web.

2010 Leisure Market Research Handbook

I just discovered that The 2010 Leisure Market Research Handbook (Richard K. Miller & Associates) is available in Business Source Complete, an EBSCO database that resides in the same suite of databases as Communication & Mass Media Complete (tell me you aren't forgetting when you go in to CMMC to select other appropriate databases!).

The book is broken up into chapters but they all look to be there. So what kind of data is in the Leisure Market Research Handbook? Demographics on leisure activities which includes lots of media usage (along with bird watching and sport card collecting) details. Special sections include film viewing, home entertainment, photography, radio listening, television viewing, video games, and online activities. There is also city-by-city breakdowns so you can compare rock concert attendance or video gaming from Akron, Ohio to Wilmington, Delaware.

I like not having to buy the book since it's available in this handy format, the trick it to remember it's here!

Business Source Complete can be entered directly into the Find It box on the ASC homepage, or just click into the first Communication database listed in the center column, Communication & Mass Media Complete (you may want other things in there), then be sure to click on "Select databases" to add Business Source Complete.

Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds

Here's just one finding from the Kaiser Family Foundation's sweeping report on the media use of youth as quoted from the Press Release:

Big changes in TV. For the first time over the course of the study, the amount of time spent watching regularly-scheduled TV declined, by 25 minutes a day (from 2004 to 2009). But the many new ways to watch TV–on the Internet, cell phones, and iPods–actually led to an increase in total TV consumption from 3:51 to 4:29 per day, including :24 of online viewing, :16 on iPods and other MP3 players, and :15 on cell phones. All told, 59% (2:39) of young people’s TV-viewing consists of live TV on a TV set, and 41% (1:50) is time-shifted, DVDs, online, or mobile.

Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds is the third in a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys by the Foundation about young people's media use. It includes data from all three waves of the study (1999, 2004, and 2009), and is among the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of information about media use among American youth.

The report was released on Wednesday, January 20, 2010, at a forum in Washington, D.C. The report itself, as well as a webcast of the event surrounding it's release and a documentary on children's media use can be found here.

Teens More "Normal" Than You Think, According to Nielsen

At the annual What Teens Want Marketing conference in New York (June 24-25), The Nielsen Company presented How Teens Use Media, to a rapt audience of post (and post post)-teens. Among the findings are that while teens are madly texting away they are still solid consumers of traditional forms of media such as television, radio and even newspapers. The love their internet but actually spend less time browsing on it than adults. And don't tell them this, but their favorite TV shows, websites and genres across media are mostly the same as their...parents.

This free report combines insights from Nielsen’s global research in television, internet, mobile, gaming, moviegoing, radio, newspaper and advertising research.

March CommQuote

This month's quote comes from Lamar Van Dyke in the current The New Yorker's American Chronicles piece, Lesbian Nation, by Ariel Levy. The article is an informative and entertaining portrait of the lesbian separatist movement of the late 1970s which never grew to more than a few thousand (but that seems huge by today's standards if you think in terms of numbers of folk willing to live so adventurously outside the consumer landscape, never mind if their adventures were a little confused). Levy focuses on the most colorful separatists, the Van Dykes, who do not represent the most influential or ideological subgroup of the movement but who would probably make for the movement's best movie (script writers looking for material, take note). Levy describes the group as a "roving band of van-driving vegans who shaved their heads, avoided speaking to men unless they were waiters or mechanics, and lived on the highways of North America for several years, stopping only on Women's Land" (p. 30). Lamar Van Dyke was their "star" and her rueful observation on our mediated existence at the conclusion of the article is our March CommQuote.

"'Your generation wants to fit in,' she told me, for the second time. 'Gays in the military and gay marriage? This is what you guys have come up with?' There was no contempt in her voice; it was something else--an almost incredulous maternal disappointment. 'We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television--we didn't sit around looking at screens,' she said. 'We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted.'"--Lamar Van Dyke, as spoken to Ariel Levy, The New Yorker, March 2, p. 37

Demographic Data Books

I've just updated our New Strategist publications. We now have the latest editions of:

The Millenials: Americans Born 1977 to 1974
Generation X: Americans Born 1965 to 1976
The Baby Boom: American Born 1946 to 1964
Older Americans: A Changing Market
Household Spending: Who Spends How Much on What
Who's Buying: Entertainment
Who's Buying: Information Products and Services

These books include demographic data on media consumption as well as larger context profiles (eduction, health, housing, income, etc.) of groups broken down by age, race, and gender. The data is rounded up from various sources (always cited) such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of the Census, Pew Research Center, National Endowment for the Arts, Federal Reserve Board, National Center for Health Statistics, and others.

In addition to these old standards, three additional volumes devoted to Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans provide even deeper data. They are:

Who We Are: Asians
Who We Are: Blacks
Who We Are: Hispanics

These titles are all available in ASC Library Reference.