Nielsen’s Media Pulse Study Looks at Women and Multicultural Consumers’ Media Behaviors

Nielsen has just released the results of a Media Pulse study that examines women and multicultural consumers’ mobile media behaviors – how they’re using technology and how it compares to the country at large.

Here are the key highlights for Women:

• Women spend 6% more time using apps and the web on tablets and more time using handheld platforms for app/web usage than their male counterparts.
• They are also more likely to utilize mobile devices for social networking than users overall.
• Because of their mobile usage, they also tend to place more importance on the features and performance of their handheld devices than men.
• Women spend 16% more time with video-focused apps/websites and 17% more time with streaming audio on tablets than all tablet users. In contrast, adult men spend far less time using tablets than the same overall base.

Highlights for Multicultural Consumers include:

• Black, Hispanic and Asian American adults each spend more time per day using apps/the web on their smartphones than the general U.S. population. African Americans in particular are heavier users of smartphones and spend nearly half an hour more per day using them than the total U.S. (and more than any other group).
• The three measured groups have comparable tablet usage and app/web tablet behaviors with all three involved in over half an hour of usage per day.
• Well known for their early adoption of newer tech, Asian Americans represent a growing consumer bloc with their own unique audience behaviors. They spend at least 45 minutes per day using a tablet, outpacing all other groups as well as the total U.S.

As the U.S. increasing becomes more diverse and multi-cultural, advertisers and programmers need to keep on top of the emerging trends with these groups. While women drive content consumption on smartphones and tablets, Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans spend more time per day using apps/the web on their smartphones than the general U.S. population. Understanding the unique user preferences is important to connecting with these audiences.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Nielsen’s Take on the Accuracy of Big Data

While many programmers have found that set top box data is immensely useful, Nielsen offers caution. Their take, as per a recent Nielsen NewsWire blog post, is that set top box data alone does not give the full picture of who is watching. They advise that this data should not be used in a vacuum because it undercounts certain demographics – especially young and diverse viewers.

According to Nielsen, “At a time when Hollywood is moving for more on-screen diversity and inclusion in TV programming, the study found, using real data, that this could have implications when it comes to programming decisions.”

Here are some highlights from that post:

1. The difference in delivery systems, especially Over-The-Air, skews return path data.

 Nielsen notes that some Americans don’t have the income to spend on premium entertainment content; others opt for over-the-air (OTA) programming in light of improving digital technology. Widespread technological advancements have fueled a steady growth of broadband-only (BBO) homes as well. The combination of OTA and BBO homes have swelled in the U.S. from 15 million homes in 2014 to nearly 28 million homes in 2018. Considering 41% of the consumers in those 28 million homes are multicultural (either Hispanic, African-American or Asian) and 10% are a younger demographic (18-24), an uncalibrated RPD sample would significantly under-represent these audiences and skew the total audience measurement.

2. Set Top Box Data Undercounts Hispanics and African Americans

Nielsen reports that compared with official U.S. Census estimates and the Nielsen national panel, RPD-capable homes under-represent Hispanics by 33%, Spanish-language dominant Hispanics by 49% and African Americans by 34%.

3. The Implications On An Actual Program Ranking is Stark

When looking at Fox’s Empire, for example, diverse audiences made up 75% of the program’s viewers in December 2018, driving ratings success when using a representative panel. However, using set top box data, these multicultural audiences were undercounted. “The differences,” noted Nielsen, “are not to be discounted. Looking at a rank among 25-54 year old viewers, Empire ranked 16th using Nielsen’s representative panel, but dropped to 38 in RPD-only homes. Conversely, Empire ranked third among OTA homes.”

Data silos continue to be a vexing problem in media. Taking return path data on its own will not give programmers a full picture of who is watching.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Welcome the New Mainstream with IPG's New Multicultural Study

The plethora of datasets coming from various sources, the fragmentation of audiences and platforms and the ever advancing technology that is changing media usage are all challenging the way marketers are shaping their business plans to reach the right audiences. But there is also increasing pressure on the creative to break through viewer distraction, ad avoidance and blocking. How to do?

IPG has just released the results of a study called The State of Video which is set to release on March 4, 2019. This study maps, what Brian Hughes, Executive Vice President, Audience Intelligence and Strategy, Magna (which is division of IPG), called, “The new mainstream” where multiculturalism needs to be taken into account in creative messaging. Hughes noted that we are on the way to a multicultural majority in America by 2060 with 2044/45 as the tipping point. In addition, the way we will reach these consumers will be digital. “2018 digital ad spend surpassed TV and it will continue,” he added, “driven by mobile.” 

So there will be many opportunities for brands to connect with this multicultural population that is surprisingly similar in some ways and extremely diverse in others. Some findings from the study upset our previous notions of what certain ethnic groups respond to in messaging and even what languages best connect to content. We need a more nuanced way to spend marketing dollars that takes all of these findings into account. 

Findings:

1.       Spanish language programming does not necessarily reach a large percentage of young Hispanics. There are great differences within the Hispanic population if we look at nativity, language used at home and out of the home and the number of years in the country, with the greatest behavioral differences occurring in nativity.

2.       The majority of American Hispanics (65%) are born in the U.S. and this has always been the case according to Dr. Jake Beniflah, Executive Director, Center for Multicultural Science, who conducted the study. Most Latinos are young; 75% of those born in American are age 35 or under while foreign born are 66% Generation X and Boomers. Each group has difference language uses, preferences and habits… and will respond to advertising differently.

3.       In the case of Spanish language TV, there is a difference between native and foreign born. Older viewers prefer Spanish language content on linear. U.S. born viewers view less in-language TV than foreign born.

4.       When it comes to creative, a general rule applies. “The consumer has to see themselves in the ad,” stated, Leslie Wood, Chief Research Officer, Nielsen Catalina. It has to make the consumer feel good about themselves and be their best self. “When that happens in an ad it resonates with consumer,” she said. Further, a deft message is required. It is acculturation rather than assimilation.

5.       When it comes to measurement, Nielsen has existing data sets, according to Hughes, that “enables us to get a more nuanced set of multicultural audience, but we are not using it today.” Yet, Wood noted that, “Race matters in getting measurement right,” and added that when a product has any connection to culture and it is part of the messaging, the response is tremendous. 

The study showed that all of these nuances need to be addressed not only in the creative but also in the media mix and platforms used. When a marketer applies nativity to their campaign spend, there is an increase in ROI, according to Beniflah.  “We are stuck in same ways of doing things in general,” concluded Hughes, who added that this is the time to improve measurement and take an acculturation approach to multi-cultural marketing.

Exploring Diversity in Audience Segmentation at the 2018 Multicultural TV Summit

In this day and age, it’s vital that the TV industry aim for inclusive representation in age, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in media content and advertising in audience segmentation, as well as a more nuanced look at who we are in all our complexities.

This need for diversity was a main takeaway from the 2018 Multicultural TV Summit in New York, where panelists from the TV industry spoke about advancing multicultural content, viewpoints, and talent. Joiava Philpott, vice president of regulatory affairs at Cox Communications, noted that while progress has been made, more effort is needed to “achieve greater diversity on our screens.”

Going Beyond the Current Approach to Audience Segmentation
How does a network achieve greater multicultural representation when its audience segments may not be so diverse? Juan Williams, co-host of The Five on Fox News, said we’re in a “moment of tremendous demo[graphic] change in the U.S. and in our media.” With a primetime lineup that’s right of center, he asked, “How do you tell stories that penetrate all of the market segments?”

Read the full article on the Videa blog.

Content that Makes Meaningful Connections. Interview with Producer Donald Perry

I met producer Donald Perry at the recent Multicultural summit and was fascinated with his impressive background and current project Family Pictures USA. 

“I've had a very unusual career path. I started off as a Foreign Exchange Trader with JP Morgan,” he explained, and from there into the intense world of high finance. In his spare time he wrote “lots of sci-fi, thriller, fantasy stuff, even published a series of novellas...oh, yeah, and that book of erotic fiction that every writer has to do at least once!”

His creative side kept calling. “One day, I started giving notes to a friend of mine on a film project he was working on - a personal doc about self-identity and negotiating the various ways of being Black. By the end of the project, I had my first film writing credit and I was hooked.” By 2010, Perry was writing full time for film and now has four feature documentaries as well as many shorter pieces. 

Charlene Weisler: Tell me about Family Pictures USA and how it got started.

Don Perry: For the last 9 years, we've been traveling around the USA, as well as to Canada and a few places in Europe, Brazil and Africa, engaging communities around their shared values and experiences. Family Pictures USA is a TV series and transmedia project that explores neighborhoods and cities through the lens of the family photo album to enlarge our understanding of history, our diversity and our shared values. We like to call it the antidote for the divisiveness that undergirds our national, even international, malaise. 

The program emerged out of the audience development project we created around Through a Lens Darkly. While making the documentary, we found that certain kinds of images were not easily accessible through museums, libraries, various institutional collections so we basically started a crowd-sourced mechanism for activating private archives, which became the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow. We've held over 55 live events, some of which lasted over several weeks, in over 40 cities on 3 continents; interviewing over 3000 participants about their family history, photos and connections to place. 18 months ago, one of our funders suggested we might have a TV show in there somewhere and we've been deep into the development process ever since. Last summer, we filmed a pilot episode in Detroit and now, we're looking to take what we've learned into wider distribution.

Weisler: How is it different from other genealogical programs.

Perry: This isn't a genealogical show at all. We focus on the stories within the family photo album... the personal testimony about the who/what/when/where/why behind the image looking for patterns, relationships and connections that unite one person's story to someone else's, perhaps someone they've never met or never imagined they had a connection to. These aren't only through family lineages, which has happened at various events, but more through people having experienced something in common, like being at the same place, at the same time, but from opposite sides of the street and witnessed an event or took part in something that was so impactful that it needed to be captured in a photograph. What we're really looking to uncover is the mystery behind that little spark of the Divine that exists just in the moment the photograph is taken. The spark we all experience every time we take a photo - a compelling desire to commit something to memory in a tangible...now digital...way.

Weisler: In an era of multiplatform, what is your digital and multiplatform strategy.

Perry: We started this project back in 2009, when there really wasn't social media as we know it today. We have been adapting the project to the new landscape. Our strategy going forward will be pretty agnostic; As long as there is an audience to reach, we'll create content for platforms that will appeal to them where they are. On Facebook and You Tube, we do short modules, from 2-minutes to 15-minutes; on Flickr we have tons of albums depicting our various events; on Instagram we have images and short stories. We generate a lot of content when we go into a location and we can cut it to fit any set of parameters, from short form to longer formats.

Weisler: How can your program encourage diversity, new ways of thinking about race and connection.

Perry: Most of our problems as a society stem from our ignorance about "The Other," people not like us, people who are different, whether by race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, class. If "They" aren't like "Us" then They are treated as outsiders, with all the suspicion that goes with not being part of the tribe.

We physically bring people from a wide range of different corners of a community together in one place, which is a cornerstone of our production process. We create a space where people can feel comfortable sharing some of the most intimate narratives about themselves, their families and their history. We give people a place where their voice is heard, honored, respected...often for the first time outside of the confines of their own close inner circles and families. In that moment of sharing their story in their authentic voice, they reveal their humanity, loves, hopes and dreams for themselves and their children and grandchildren. We learn about moments of tremendous pain which they have suffered, but which they have also overcome and found a certain peace. We create a palpable link from one person's eyes to another's heart. The payoff is, as Antonio Lucio, CMO at HP, Inc., said in an article in AdWeek recently, “It is harder to hate someone you know.” 

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Q&A Interview with Howard Horowitz, Horowitz Associates

Howard Horowitz is best known for his eponymous company Horowitz Associates, Inc. a full-service market research company specializing in research for distributors, networks and technology companies on television, digital and multiplatform services and content. In this interview, Howard discusses his background in political, media and market research, trends over past decade in the multicultural landscape culminating in the release of Census 2010, and the anticipated impact on the ways and means of television usage with the coming of age of a new generation of young people.

Below are five videos that comprise the full interview. They are as follows:

Subject Length (in minutes)
Background (4:43)
Multicultural (4:58)
TV Trends (7:57)
Age Differences in Media (7:17)
Predictions, OTT (5:11)


Charlene Weisler interviews Howard Horowitz who discusses his background in this 4:43 minute video:




Howard Horowitz of Horowitz Associates talks about his 2011 Multicultural study based on the 2010 census in this 4:58 minute long video:




Charlene Weisler interviews Howard Horowitz who talks about TV Trends in this fast paced 7:57 minute video:




Howard Horowitz discusses what he sees as the age differences in media use. This video is 7:17 minutes long:




In this final video, Howard Horowitz offers some predictions and his assessment of Over The Top Television. The video is 5:11 minutes long.