On Monday, March 16, 2015, Rolfe Swinton, Chief Research Officer for RealityMine will be presenting at the ARF Re:Think 2015 Conference. The presentation will look at whether multi-screening is clutter or an asset for marketers to leverage.
Many marketers tend to think about their target customers in terms of demographics or psychographics, static profiles used to broadly categorize audiences. Those static profiles don’t reflect the fact that each of us is actually subtlety changing as we go about our daily lives.
Think about a working mother, aged 35, who lives in the suburbs, commutes to work every day by train, has an office job and earns $65,000 a year. At first she is that busy mom, having a hectic breakfast, getting kids ready for school and out to their school bus. Then she is a commuter on the train into the city getting ready for her day – having a moment of calm to herself. Then she is a manager in a white-collar company job focused on doing the work of the day. When she gets home she might have to switch into a custodial services role tidying up the home, before switching into mother mode again for dinner and homework, and ultimately making time for her partner.
Is that person exactly the same in each of those roles? Does she feel and behave the same way? In order to understand who she is at any moment, we certainly need to understand her demographics and psychographics, but increasingly we also need to understand her context.
This becomes more true because she, like the rest of us, is engaging on multiple screens. Mobile phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices oftentimes complement TV viewing, and are other times completely standalone tools. What we need is data to understand how she is using these screens and how marketers can best deliver a message in the right context to her.
The question of how to reach her effectively is an ever-harder question to answer – especially if it involves a second screen. The answer to what is the optimal screen to reach the target is every bit as variable as when to reach them due to the proliferation of media channels that are available and the variety of choices people make.
RealityMine’s market-leading Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, TouchPoints, enables market researchers to actively engage with opt-in panelists regarding their daily behavior, while passively collecting and analyzing their digital activity across devices including mobile phones, tablets, PCs and smart TVs.
The data we present on multi-screen and second screen usage underlines that while she may be a single person, her context fundamentally affects how she chooses to consume media on one or many platforms. It also impacts how receptive she is to specific messages that may be delivered through different channels given that context.
There is now an opportunity for marketers to use behavioral and contextual data, like what is available through RealityMine’s TouchPoints, to quantify the context of consumers and their changing cross-media behaviors. Enabling marketers to develop strategies to reach their audience more efficiently, and trigger the specific behaviors they seek more effectively.
To download a copy of the full whitepaper, click here.
