Research: Mobile and the meshing of media
By Simon Fuller. Web, wirelessly. The European Interactive Advertising Association has taken a good long look at digital mobility across 15 European countries, and found that consumers are increasingly accessing the Net via their mobile phones and wireless laptops.
According to the Mediascope Europe Study 2010, more than 70 million consumers use mobile Internet on at least a weekly basis, passing an average of 6.4 hours a week online. That compares to just 4.8 hours spent with a newspaper.
“[The trend] is caused by the proliferation of devices with mobile Internet, and also the drop in price of packages which offer mobile Internet,” says Alison Fennah, executive director at the EIAA. “[This has] led to more Internet on the move.”
The study also found that a quarter of 16-to-24 year-olds use their mobiles for the web, and spend a higher than average amount of time browsing every week, clocking up more than seven hours on average.
All of this will have an impact on marketers.
“Everybody has been talking for some time about when mobile marketing is going to arise,” says Fennah. “Well, it is arising now and we have to make sure that… agencies have the tools in place to take part in this, and that they understand the difference between what’s appropriate for mobile marketing, and what’s appropriate for PC marketing [and so on].
“Some agencies lack these skills. There are lots of specialist mobile marketing agencies out there, and we need to integrate the broader agencies who are less specialised.”
The study also found that media is becoming meshed together, with more than one third of Europeans using the Net while also engaged with the TV.
“New age patterns of media consumption indicate that marketers should be looking to develop multiplatform strategies that reach and connect with consumers more effectively and increase ROI,” says Fennah. “This is opposed to making media decisions based on an ‘either or’ basis if they want to reach all demographics.
You can have one single campaign [with multiple media components],” adds Fennah. “But you have to make sure that you get the creative right for different types of media.”
