Grid search for media planners
Time-use studies are booming and analyze media consumption down to the minute
Time budget studies are booming and dissect media consumption down to the minuteBy Wolfgang Koschnick Time budget studies sometimes document the media consumption of test subjects down to the minute. However, the knowledge gained from these studies rarely justifies the effort involved. During the day, people listen to the radio and leaf through newspapers a lot, but from 6 p.m. onwards, consumers' attention is focused on television.
Recently, one time budget study has followed the next: first the Munich-based TV marketer SevenOne Media, which is also active in Switzerland, published its long-term study "TimeBudget 1999-2001", followed by the RTL marketer IP Deutschland with "Medien im Tagesablauf 2002". But what exactly is time budget research and what benefits does it provide?
Time budget studies are empirical studies that determine what the people observed do during a specified period of time. How they spend a day or a week. The aim is to find out how much time
they typically spend on certain activities.
In essence, the time-budget method is a tool for reconstructing the daily routine of test subjects - and is therefore pretty old hat. This is because it was already used as an instrument by the Austrian-American social researcher Paul F. Lazarsfeld at the end of the 1930s. The decisive advantage of this method lies in the necessity for the interviewer and the interviewee to go through the entire daily routine chronologically from morning to evening without being overwhelmed by the systematic approach. In the listener research, the instrument also had the additional advantage that the interviewees did not even suspect that it was about commercial radio when they were thinking about what they had been doing yesterday afternoon at around 3.00 pm.
Media ascetics are the most avid TV viewers
In media research, the media use of the previous day is usually surveyed using a more or less finely structured time grid. Respondents are usually unable to reliably recall longer than this. And since the use of the Radiocontrol clock and other technical measuring devices, it is actually pretty certain that they can't even do that.
But that doesn't explain why this wave of time budget studies has emerged. But are they so productive that media planners need a new one every year? In principle, the findings are always the same: People spend quite a lot of time with media.
The "basic study" by IP Deutschland, "MiT 2002", found that people in Germany spend an average of 260 minutes a day using media. The rest is spent working and sleeping. At weekends, Germans spend around 25 minutes more on media than on weekdays. Of the five media types surveyed (TV, radio, magazines, daily newspapers and the Internet), television is by far the number one with 150 minutes per day. Only 86 minutes are spent listening to the radio.
Significantly lower values were measured for print media: At 19 minutes, the daily newspaper is still ahead of magazines (11 minutes). And due to its relatively low penetration among the German population (37% of the population aged 14 and over use the medium at least occasionally), the internet brings up the rear with six minutes of daily use per person.
"MiT 2002" shows that television can be used to quickly build up a high reach. Whether executives, people with a particularly high household income or with a higher level of education: In every target group, TV accounts for over 50% of total media usage. And television also reaches people with below-average media usage. The "media ascetics", the quarter of the population with the lowest media consumption, even have the highest TV share of all target groups at 64%. This means that those with little time prefer to reach for the TV remote control for information and entertainment.
The study design of "MiT 2002" also makes it possible to record the parallel use of several media. The contact quality of a medium depends largely on how exclusive this contact is. 98% of TV use takes place without the simultaneous use of other media - the best value of all the mass media recorded. Radio follows with 91%. The Internet also achieves high exclusivity values: 81% of surfers do not use any other medium at the same time. Print media follow at a considerable distance with 67% of exclusive use (magazine) and 64% (daily newspaper).
With great scientific fanfare, "MiT 2002" found out that television is a great medium. Is it even necessary to mention that the client of this fabulous study is a TV marketing company?
Other studies produce completely different results in some cases. Time budget studies commissioned by print media publishers inevitably find that people spend more time with print media and that this is the best time of the day. This indicates a certain arbitrariness in the results.
One year before "MiT 2002", TV marketer SevenOne Media published the first results of the long-term study "TimeBudget 1999- 2001". Every summer since 1999, the market research institute Forsa has surveyed a representative group of Germans aged between 14 and 49 (a total of 2,487 people) about their media use.
According to the initial results, every German spent around 7.5 hours a day using media in 2001, i.e. several times the amount of time recorded by IP Deutschland. In 1999, the figure was 6.5 hours. The lion's share of "TimeBudget" is accounted for by the accompanying medium of radio (169 minutes) and television (153 minutes). This is followed by books
(32 minutes) and the internet (30 minutes). According to this study, the average person spends 24 minutes on newspapers and 15 minutes on magazines.
According to "TimeBudget", television and radio are the media with the highest reach. 97% of all 14- to 49-year-olds in Germany can be reached via television, while the figure for 14- to 29-year-olds is just under 100%. Radio achieves similar figures with 93% (14 to 49-year-olds). Print media have lost reach. Whereas in 1999, 92% still stated that they at least rarely read a newspaper, in 2001 this figure was only 88%. In the same period, magazines fell from 73% to 65%.
The various media are used differently throughout the day. Depending on the time of day, a different medium takes center stage. Two out of five Germans read the newspaper at breakfast or on the way to work to find out about the events of the previous day. After nine o'clock, the daily newspaper loses a lot of its reach and is hardly read after 10 pm. Radio, on the other hand, remains the most used medium during the day until 6 pm. Whether on the road in the car or at work in the office - for many, the radio is a constant companion in the background throughout the day.
Respondents were asked to indicate the preferred information medium for their respective area of interest. The result: Television is the medium of choice for almost all of the topics examined. Only for business information and news from the region did the daily newspaper come out on top, and radio for traffic information and music. The top competencies of television are diverse. It is almost unrivaled when it comes to documentaries, eroticism and entertainment, and respondents also see few alternatives to television for current information in the areas of news, sport and weather.
The daily newspaper has its core competencies in the area of current information. When it comes to local news, business, politics, sport and news, the daily newspaper is at the forefront. Radio is almost unrivaled when it comes to traffic information. Radio is also still the first choice for music - although the internet is already in third place here thanks to the mp3 boom. According to the respondents, teletext is particularly strong in terms of content when it comes to sports news, weather and travel, but also traffic information and business news - in other words, where concise and quickly available information is required.
Spaniards don't care about the media at the weekend Different media are used by different population groups. While television and radio are media for the entire population, the other media have a clear focus in the socio-demographic groups. The Internet still has a user structure in which a disproportionate number of men, young people, high earners and a large number of university graduates are represented. However, these proportions have already decreased in recent years, and with the further spread of the Internet, user structures will also become even more similar to the structure of the population as a whole.
Of the more recent studies, "Media in Mind", which was first conducted in 1998 on behalf of Universal Media, London, is the most worthy of mention. It bears the subtitle "Consumption and lifestyle habits in Europe" and examined
media usage behavior in ten European countries. The study is conducted annually in May or June and, in addition to the whole of Europe (including Switzerland), now covers numerous other countries in North and South America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
The aim of "Media in Mind" is to obtain internationally comparable results on the qualitative aspects of media use. The central question of the survey was: "Which media and advertising media are consumed where, with whom and how during the course of the day in the various countries?"
The location of the activity is also taken into account (e.g. at home). Qualitative categories also supplement the time- and location-specific analysis of media consumption. These include the level of attention of the consumer, the environmental situation (alone or with friends) and the mood during media consumption (relaxed or depressed).
The media covered are television and radio (both broken down into private and public broadcasters) as well as newspapers and magazines. Video, cinema visits and the Internet are also surveyed, but without taking the attention factor into account.
With "Media in Mind", Universal Media is able to recognize regularities in the daily mood of target groups and thus use them to optimize the quality of media plans.
In order to ensure that the people concerned perform their task conscientiously, some countries rely on willing respondents whose addresses are collected in Infratest Burke's Access Panel. In Germany, for example, 100,000 addresses are available from which a random sample is drawn. In other countries that do not have an access panel, the addresses are generated by random sampling. Respondents are sent a questionnaire and a diary.
The study revealed considerable differences between the countries. Take newspaper reading, for example: Compared to other European countries, Germans read newspapers the most and most intensively. The newspaper has the highest proportion of attentive users in Germany for almost the entire day. More than a third of respondents stated that they read their newspaper very attentively in the morning.
Only a small proportion of German radio listeners say they listen attentively to the program. Magazines are also flicked through rather than studied attentively for most of the day. On Sundays, Germans devote more time to the media than any other nation. They pay the most attention to newspapers and television. Spaniards and Italians, on the other hand, spend a lot of time away from home at the weekend.
The results from "Media in Mind" confirm what was already known from other studies: television is still predominantly used in the evening. The usage curve rises slowly from around 5 p.m. and reaches its highest level at 8 p.m. during the "Tagesschau" time slot; after 10 p.m. it quickly flattens out.
The British, on the other hand, are out more often in the evenings than Germans. As a result, TV usage in prime time is lower than in Germany. However, this begins earlier in England: from 4 p.m. onwards, there is a continuous increase in TV usage. The use of breakfast TV is significantly higher than in Germany, but still at a very low level. More TV is also watched in the afternoon in the UK than in Germany.
Another peculiarity of the British is the relatively high use of television outside the home. Almost all major football matches on the island are broadcast exclusively on pay-TV channels, which many English people can only watch with friends or in pubs. As in Germany, the level of attention paid to radio is very low.
Recently, one time budget study has followed the next: first the Munich-based TV marketer SevenOne Media, which is also active in Switzerland, published its long-term study "TimeBudget 1999-2001", followed by the RTL marketer IP Deutschland with "Medien im Tagesablauf 2002". But what exactly is time budget research and what benefits does it provide?
Time budget studies are empirical studies that determine what the people observed do during a specified period of time. How they spend a day or a week. The aim is to find out how much time
they typically spend on certain activities.
In essence, the time-budget method is a tool for reconstructing the daily routine of test subjects - and is therefore pretty old hat. This is because it was already used as an instrument by the Austrian-American social researcher Paul F. Lazarsfeld at the end of the 1930s. The decisive advantage of this method lies in the necessity for the interviewer and the interviewee to go through the entire daily routine chronologically from morning to evening without being overwhelmed by the systematic approach. In the listener research, the instrument also had the additional advantage that the interviewees did not even suspect that it was about commercial radio when they were thinking about what they had been doing yesterday afternoon at around 3.00 pm.
Media ascetics are the most avid TV viewers
In media research, the media use of the previous day is usually surveyed using a more or less finely structured time grid. Respondents are usually unable to reliably recall longer than this. And since the use of the Radiocontrol clock and other technical measuring devices, it is actually pretty certain that they can't even do that.
But that doesn't explain why this wave of time budget studies has emerged. But are they so productive that media planners need a new one every year? In principle, the findings are always the same: People spend quite a lot of time with media.
The "basic study" by IP Deutschland, "MiT 2002", found that people in Germany spend an average of 260 minutes a day using media. The rest is spent working and sleeping. At weekends, Germans spend around 25 minutes more on media than on weekdays. Of the five media types surveyed (TV, radio, magazines, daily newspapers and the Internet), television is by far the number one with 150 minutes per day. Only 86 minutes are spent listening to the radio.
Significantly lower values were measured for print media: At 19 minutes, the daily newspaper is still ahead of magazines (11 minutes). And due to its relatively low penetration among the German population (37% of the population aged 14 and over use the medium at least occasionally), the internet brings up the rear with six minutes of daily use per person.
"MiT 2002" shows that television can be used to quickly build up a high reach. Whether executives, people with a particularly high household income or with a higher level of education: In every target group, TV accounts for over 50% of total media usage. And television also reaches people with below-average media usage. The "media ascetics", the quarter of the population with the lowest media consumption, even have the highest TV share of all target groups at 64%. This means that those with little time prefer to reach for the TV remote control for information and entertainment.
The study design of "MiT 2002" also makes it possible to record the parallel use of several media. The contact quality of a medium depends largely on how exclusive this contact is. 98% of TV use takes place without the simultaneous use of other media - the best value of all the mass media recorded. Radio follows with 91%. The Internet also achieves high exclusivity values: 81% of surfers do not use any other medium at the same time. Print media follow at a considerable distance with 67% of exclusive use (magazine) and 64% (daily newspaper).
With great scientific fanfare, "MiT 2002" found out that television is a great medium. Is it even necessary to mention that the client of this fabulous study is a TV marketing company?
Other studies produce completely different results in some cases. Time budget studies commissioned by print media publishers inevitably find that people spend more time with print media and that this is the best time of the day. This indicates a certain arbitrariness in the results.
One year before "MiT 2002", TV marketer SevenOne Media published the first results of the long-term study "TimeBudget 1999- 2001". Every summer since 1999, the market research institute Forsa has surveyed a representative group of Germans aged between 14 and 49 (a total of 2,487 people) about their media use.
According to the initial results, every German spent around 7.5 hours a day using media in 2001, i.e. several times the amount of time recorded by IP Deutschland. In 1999, the figure was 6.5 hours. The lion's share of "TimeBudget" is accounted for by the accompanying medium of radio (169 minutes) and television (153 minutes). This is followed by books
(32 minutes) and the internet (30 minutes). According to this study, the average person spends 24 minutes on newspapers and 15 minutes on magazines.
According to "TimeBudget", television and radio are the media with the highest reach. 97% of all 14- to 49-year-olds in Germany can be reached via television, while the figure for 14- to 29-year-olds is just under 100%. Radio achieves similar figures with 93% (14 to 49-year-olds). Print media have lost reach. Whereas in 1999, 92% still stated that they at least rarely read a newspaper, in 2001 this figure was only 88%. In the same period, magazines fell from 73% to 65%.
The various media are used differently throughout the day. Depending on the time of day, a different medium takes center stage. Two out of five Germans read the newspaper at breakfast or on the way to work to find out about the events of the previous day. After nine o'clock, the daily newspaper loses a lot of its reach and is hardly read after 10 pm. Radio, on the other hand, remains the most used medium during the day until 6 pm. Whether on the road in the car or at work in the office - for many, the radio is a constant companion in the background throughout the day.
Respondents were asked to indicate the preferred information medium for their respective area of interest. The result: Television is the medium of choice for almost all of the topics examined. Only for business information and news from the region did the daily newspaper come out on top, and radio for traffic information and music. The top competencies of television are diverse. It is almost unrivaled when it comes to documentaries, eroticism and entertainment, and respondents also see few alternatives to television for current information in the areas of news, sport and weather.
The daily newspaper has its core competencies in the area of current information. When it comes to local news, business, politics, sport and news, the daily newspaper is at the forefront. Radio is almost unrivaled when it comes to traffic information. Radio is also still the first choice for music - although the internet is already in third place here thanks to the mp3 boom. According to the respondents, teletext is particularly strong in terms of content when it comes to sports news, weather and travel, but also traffic information and business news - in other words, where concise and quickly available information is required.
Spaniards don't care about the media at the weekend Different media are used by different population groups. While television and radio are media for the entire population, the other media have a clear focus in the socio-demographic groups. The Internet still has a user structure in which a disproportionate number of men, young people, high earners and a large number of university graduates are represented. However, these proportions have already decreased in recent years, and with the further spread of the Internet, user structures will also become even more similar to the structure of the population as a whole.
Of the more recent studies, "Media in Mind", which was first conducted in 1998 on behalf of Universal Media, London, is the most worthy of mention. It bears the subtitle "Consumption and lifestyle habits in Europe" and examined
media usage behavior in ten European countries. The study is conducted annually in May or June and, in addition to the whole of Europe (including Switzerland), now covers numerous other countries in North and South America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
The aim of "Media in Mind" is to obtain internationally comparable results on the qualitative aspects of media use. The central question of the survey was: "Which media and advertising media are consumed where, with whom and how during the course of the day in the various countries?"
The location of the activity is also taken into account (e.g. at home). Qualitative categories also supplement the time- and location-specific analysis of media consumption. These include the level of attention of the consumer, the environmental situation (alone or with friends) and the mood during media consumption (relaxed or depressed).
The media covered are television and radio (both broken down into private and public broadcasters) as well as newspapers and magazines. Video, cinema visits and the Internet are also surveyed, but without taking the attention factor into account.
With "Media in Mind", Universal Media is able to recognize regularities in the daily mood of target groups and thus use them to optimize the quality of media plans.
In order to ensure that the people concerned perform their task conscientiously, some countries rely on willing respondents whose addresses are collected in Infratest Burke's Access Panel. In Germany, for example, 100,000 addresses are available from which a random sample is drawn. In other countries that do not have an access panel, the addresses are generated by random sampling. Respondents are sent a questionnaire and a diary.
The study revealed considerable differences between the countries. Take newspaper reading, for example: Compared to other European countries, Germans read newspapers the most and most intensively. The newspaper has the highest proportion of attentive users in Germany for almost the entire day. More than a third of respondents stated that they read their newspaper very attentively in the morning.
Only a small proportion of German radio listeners say they listen attentively to the program. Magazines are also flicked through rather than studied attentively for most of the day. On Sundays, Germans devote more time to the media than any other nation. They pay the most attention to newspapers and television. Spaniards and Italians, on the other hand, spend a lot of time away from home at the weekend.
The results from "Media in Mind" confirm what was already known from other studies: television is still predominantly used in the evening. The usage curve rises slowly from around 5 p.m. and reaches its highest level at 8 p.m. during the "Tagesschau" time slot; after 10 p.m. it quickly flattens out.
The British, on the other hand, are out more often in the evenings than Germans. As a result, TV usage in prime time is lower than in Germany. However, this begins earlier in England: from 4 p.m. onwards, there is a continuous increase in TV usage. The use of breakfast TV is significantly higher than in Germany, but still at a very low level. More TV is also watched in the afternoon in the UK than in Germany.
Another peculiarity of the British is the relatively high use of television outside the home. Almost all major football matches on the island are broadcast exclusively on pay-TV channels, which many English people can only watch with friends or in pubs. As in Germany, the level of attention paid to radio is very low.
