Study Confirms Smartphones Now #1 Screen, Beating TV

A report released this week by Millward Brown takes a quantitative and qualitative look at multiscreen activity from a number of perspectives. The report is based on a global survey (n=12,000 respondents, 30 countries). The US sample was 444 people, with some behavioral monitoring and interviews. I’m going to discuss just a few of the […]

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A report released this week by Millward Brown takes a quantitative and qualitative look at multiscreen activity from a number of perspectives. The report is based on a global survey (n=12,000 respondents, 30 countries). The US sample was 444 people, with some behavioral monitoring and interviews.

I’m going to discuss just a few of the findings. However, there’s a great deal of interesting material in the report, which is free.

While this has been asserted by others in the past, Millward Brown confirmed that in the US daily smartphone screen time has now surpassed TV. That’s also true worldwide. If one combines smartphone and tablet screen time the total exceeds TV by nearly an hour per day.

Smartphone screen time vs. TV

The US portion of the study also found that 41 percent of the TV audience was simultaneously using a mobile device (tablet, smartphone). For that multiscreening audience, 70 percent are looking and “unrelated content” (called “stacking” in the report). The other 30 percent are exploring related content or taking some action tied to the content or advertising on TV (“meshing”).

Reasons For “Meshing” (Interacting Re TV Show/Ad Content)

Millward Brown reasons for meshing

Reasons For “Stacking” (Looking At Unrelated Content)

Reasons for stacking Millward Brown

TV advertising still captured the most attention and favorable attitudes compared with other screens, according to the study. Digital screens were otherwise comparable to one another.

Attitudes toward ads

Finally there remains a huge gap between time spent and ad spend. TV has more than its share (for time spent) of the ad spend whereas there’s a massive gap between mobile time and ad spend: a combined 44 percent of time vs. 11 percent of spend.

Ad-attention gap

That’s probably about to change dramatically. Mobile ad spending is expected to grow significantly on a global basis and in the US according to the latest forecast from eMarketer.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Greg Sterling
Contributor
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.

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