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Much is made about how media usage varies among the generations, and two recent studies—Attest’s “U.S. Media Consumption Report” and Parks Associates’ “The Evolving Digital Landscape”—offer new insights on the topic.
As Table 1 shows, in terms of overall media consumption, Attest’s survey confirmed what other research has found, namely that older viewers watch more live TV and younger viewers gravitate to streamed TV. It’s also no surprise that those in the youngest age group (Gen Z) are the most avid users of social media. Attest did reveal some interesting media habits, however, namely that Millennials (aged 25-40) represented the largest proportion of those claiming to read newspapers and magazines weekly. And a larger proportion of Gen X respondents claimed to listen to the radio daily, beating out Boomers, who usually tend to favor the medium.
The generations did have some things in common. The majority of each age group claimed to participate in gaming on a daily basis. At first this seemed surprising, but “gaming” can include anything from Fortnite to online crossword puzzles, hence the high numbers across the board. And in bad news for print media, the percentage of respondents who claimed to read newspapers and magazines weekly were lousy across the board.
Providing a more granular level of differences by age, we turn to Parks Associates’ “The Evolving Digital Landscape.” Here, the research is expressed by life stage, but it is easy to see how these correspond to the generational data above. As shown in Table 2, respondents were asked to identify their preferred genres of online video services. The top two genres were comedy and drama, regardless of life stage. Other genres that made the top 10 of every life stage were horror, non-fiction, science fiction, sports and reality. Outliers included anime and LGBTQ+ for younger respondents, and foreign and music/theater among older respondents.
We would be interested to know if this type of pattern repeats within other media. In other words, while Attest’s survey showed that, compared to Boomers, more than double the proportion of Gen Z viewers streamed 3+ hours of video daily, Parks Associates’ genre preferences within online video found more similarities than differences across the age groups. It may be that among the generations, the differences lie in how the content is accessed, not what’s actually being viewed, listened to or read.
As Wayne Friedman highlighted recently in MediaPost, although the first week of the new primetime season featured better ratings than last year, “The top five English-language broadcast networks’ prime-time shows are down 20% on average to 5.1 million viewers when looking at Nielsen-measured live program-plus-seven days of time-shifted viewing (L7) versus the same week in 2019.” While that’s certainly not good news, the real issue for national advertisers is not how individual shows are trending relative to past seasons but, rather if they are still able to attain the reach levels they planned on for schedules placed in many shows on many networks, cable channels and nationally syndicated shows. For example, if a brand got 400 GRPs per month in 2019, it might have expected a reach of around 60% with additional consumers being exposed over longer periods of time. That brand can still buy 400 GRPs today, although it will cost more. The crucial question is whether its schedule can still reach roughly 60% per month, and more in a quarter? If the answer is yes, or there is only a slight decline in reach—say a few percentage points monthly—then there's no need to panic, though it calls for continued monitoring. If, however, the four-week reach for a typical 400 GRP buy properly dispersed has declined to 50%, that's when serious alternatives or rethinking about the media mix should be initiated.