In the past we always figured households who can’t be reached by television were unplugged from the grid entirely. Well, according to a new report from Nielsen that number has grown to 4% and most of these homes have TVs… they’re just using Netflix, Play Stations with web access and plugging in their laptops for their programming. Further  validation for a second screen strategy that ensures you are reaching younger, technology savvy consumers.

H/T to AP for the article

Nielsen Shows How People Use TV Differently

NEW YORK (AP) — The number of U.S. homes that don’t get traditional television service continues to increase, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have TVs.

The Nielsen company said in a report issued on Tuesday that three-quarters of the estimated 5 million homes that don’t get TV signals over the airways or through cable, satellite or telecommunications companies have televisions anyway.

Many of these homes are satisfied to use their TVs for games or get programming through DVDs or services like Netflix or Apple TV, said Dounia Turrill, senior vice president for client insights at Nielsen.

The company’s report shows how the nature of TV service is slowly changing. Before the percentage started declining about three years ago, more than 99 percent of TV homes received the traditional TV signals. Now that has dipped just below 96 percent.

Part of the decline is also economic — service deemed expendable by people struggling to make ends meet, Nielsen said.

Because of the changes, Nielsen is considering redefining what it considers a television household to include people who get service through Netflix or similar services instead of the traditional TV signals, Turrill said.

During the first three months of 2012, the average consumer spent about 2 percent less time watching traditional TV than the previous year, Nielsen said. They more than made up for that by spending more time watching material recorded on DVRs or on the Internet through TVs, computers and mobile devices.

The typical consumer spends 14 minutes a day using gaming consoles, although it’s more for owners of Wii, XBox and PlayStation 3, Nielsen said. Many of these devices are also popular sites for accessing video, Turrill said.

“The gaming devices are becoming entertainment hubs,” she said.

People over age 65 spend nearly 48 hours, on average, watching television each week, Nielsen said. At the other end of the spectrum are teenagers aged 12 to 17, who spend an average of 22 hours per week watching TV.

Blacks spend an average of 210 hours per month watching TV, more than whites (nearly 153 hours), Latinos (131 hours) and Asians (100 hours), Nielsen said

As how we consume television keeps changing it is encouraging to see Neilsen update their studies to account for more second screen opportunities. It will be very interesting to see how the new data compares to the current surveys… and if the stations agree to this new currency

H/T to Mediapost for the article

Nielsen To Overhaul Local Metrics In 4Q

Nielsen’s overhaul of its local measurement service with set-top-box (STB) data and a new code reader will begin rolling out late this year in the Charlotte, Dallas and St. Louis markets. The new data will be available alongside the current ratings in early 2013, allowing stations an opportunity to evaluate it before a switchover.

Station groups with a presence in the three initial markets — including NBCUniversal, Belo, Cox and Gannett — will be able to both explore the data’s reliability and ways to integrate it into their workflow systems over a period that could run six months. The three launch markets currently get ratings via local people meters (LPMs).

As the new service takes hold in the October-December period this year, Nielsen will begin implementing it in five markets that use set meters: Albuquerque, Birmingham, Greenville, S.C., Nashville and New Orleans. Also, the methodology will debut in 12 markets to be announced soon that use diaries.

With 20 markets experimenting with the new methodology by early 2013, the plan is to have the system up and running in most of the country’s 210 markets some time in 2014. All markets will have a “parallel period” to examine the new and current systems side by side to get comfortable.

“We want them to start evaluating how they would do business with it,” said Pat Dineen, a Nielsen senior vice president.

A permanent switchover won’t come without lengthy and detailed conversations with clients, some of whom have expressed eagerness to push ahead with the new system. Others have expressed reticence. From stations to ad agencies, all want more detail and assurances.

“They’re not going to give us an easy time on that,” Dineen said. “We need to be very, very clear and very, very transparent. We need to work with the (Media Rating Council) to make sure our methodology works and works for the whole marketplace.”

The new “hybrid” service does not throw out the entire legacy system. Markets will continue to use panels derived from LPMs, set meters and diaries — although the sample sizes in LPM and set-meter markets will be effectively quadrupled and doubled in diary markets.

Those panels will be supplemented by STB data and code readers. The newly developed code readers are electronic devices that will separately monitor every TV in a home, picking up audio signals from content carrying a Nielsen watermark.

Nielsen’s belief is the combination will allow for more precise modeling as the legacy operations provide information on demographics. The STB data offers granular second-by-second viewing data. The code readers serve as a backstop to ensure viewing is not counted if a set-top-box remains on, but no one is watching.

Nielsen believes the hybrid model will allow it to project ratings for a full market, which includes homes that receive only over-the-air TV and others that don’t have a set-top box.

It might also protect against potentially skewed data coming from STBs. For example, the two largest cable operators, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, don’t make data available to Nielsen or any other measurement company.

Right away, data from a huge portion of U.S. homes is unobtainable. And, in a market where one of those leading operators serves loads of homes — such as Philadelphia or New York City — using STB information to project results for the full market carries a risk.

Nielsen obtains STB data from cable operator Charter and DirecTV, but concedes it will need access to more sources. Return-path data is a broader term often used to describe STB data and other streams.

Clients have lobbied for some use of STB data, since they believe it could cut down on huge swings in ratings. Nielsen believes the information along with the code reader should offer more stability.

“Until I see data and until I have a better understanding of the complete methodology, it’s hard to say,” said Pat Liguori, who oversees research for the ABC-owned stations.

Clients will have more to evaluate than just TV measurement. The new service is designed to capture multiplatform consumption across TVs, PCs, mobile devices and tablets. With sample sizes growing significantly, Dineen said the plan is to be able to gauge four-screen usage in the homes added.

Wouldn’t it be nice to forget your wallet — permanently?

That day is coming sooner than you think. In the walletless future there will be no credit cards to lose, no cash to carry and no concert tickets to leave at home. Already, with a few taps on the screen of your smartphone, you can order a meal at a restaurant, loan your friend 20 bucks or even unlock the door to your house (so you can lose the keys too).

Nearly half of U.S. consumers own smartphones, and as they have gained popularity the devices have grown to resemble pocket mini-malls, with rows of virtual storefronts where consumers can buy video games, music, books and TV shows.

It’s becoming such big business that the largest banks and credit card firms are partnering with wireless carriers, handset makers and eager software developers to push the smartphone further into the center of global commerce.

The plan is to turn your phone into a digital wallet that will let you pay for just about anything, whether you’re online or at the register. By 2016, mobile payments are expected to reach $617 billion worldwide, a nearly sixfold increase from last year’s $105 billion, according to research firm Gartner Inc.By then smartphones are expected to account for close to two thirds of all U.S. mobile phones.

There are big advantages to electronic money. It’s easier and quicker to process than cash or plastic, and without the need to fish around for credit cards or wait for receipts to print, long lines may become a thing of the past.

What that all tallies up to is that the way we buy and pay for things is in for the biggest change in decades — certainly since the rise of plastic cards in the 1950s, and perhaps since the emergence of personal checks a century earlier.

“We’re going into a world where the consumer is going to be given lots and lots of different choices about how they pay, each with its own perks,” said Carol Coye Benson, a partner at payment consulting firm Glenbrook Partners. “Cash and credit are the primary methods that everyone uses now, but it won’t look like that in five years.”

Although still embryonic, the world of smartphone payments is developing fast.

Since launching its mobile app last year, Starbucks has processed more than 45 million digital payments in 9,000 locations, and a recent visit to a store in the Cahuenga Pass showed why.

Morning coffee customers stood in line, nearly all of them tapping away at their smartphones, sending text messages, reading email, or in one case playing a poker video game.

When Andy Deer’s turn came to buy a pound of coffee beans, he opened his iPhone‘s Starbucks app and tapped “Touch to Pay.” The phone flashed up a bar code, and the cashier scanned it. That was it — $12 disappeared from Deer’s Starbucks account, a receipt arrived in his email inbox and a cartoon star dropped into a cup on the phone’s screen; two more and he would earn a free beverage.

“It’s just a lot easier than carrying another card around,” said Deer, a 37-year-old landscaper from Atwater Village.

Anytime the Starbucks app’s balance falls below $12, it automatically refills to $25 by pulling from his credit card account. Deer’s iPhone also has an app from Fandango that lets him buy movie tickets, and another from Amazon.com allows him to scan bar codes at a store such as Toys R Us — if Amazon sells the teddy bear for less, he can instantly order it through the Internet retailer.

“I’d be so hip to just having my fingerprint work for everything so I wouldn’t have to carry anything else,” he said.

A variety of mobile payment options is already sprouting up around Los Angeles.

Users of the PayDragon app can order up whatever they’d like from a smorgasbord of local food trucks. Tapping Octo Shrimp will cost you five bucks at Temaki Truck, while a Fuego Burrito from the Wake n Bake Wagon goes for $7. The app’s makers say that being able to order and pay from your phone, whether you’re in front of the truck on the sidewalk or a few blocks away at your office, saves customers a lot of wasted time.

“There’s no value at all, ever, to standing in line,” said Hamilton Chan, the founder of PayDragon, which takes a small cut each time an item is sold using the app.

At The Park’s Finest Barbecue in Westlake, diners can pay for their ribs with the Square app, developed by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey. And across town at Andrew’s Cheese shop in Santa Monica, shoppers can fill up a basket of Brie and Roquefort before checking out with KuaPay, which pops up a special bar code that the cheese shop can read with its smartphone’s camera.

The increasingly crowded field of companies looking to profit from digital payments also includes giants in the technology, payment and telecommunications industries.

Read the full article in the LA Times

This is the dawn of the smartphone age. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at mobile advertising spend. Last week in this space, Derek Thompson showed that consumers are spending 10% of their media attention on their mobile devices while the medium only commands a mere 1% of total ad-spend. Comparatively, the quickly “dying” print medium attracts only about 7% of media-time, but still captures an astonishing 25% of the total U.S. ad-spend, with print receiving 25-times more ad money than mobile.

The disparity between the two mediums gives a strong indication as to how much room mobile still has to grow.

While industry analysts have become increasingly bullish on the growth of the mobile medium and industry behemoths like Facebook are building out their mobile capabilities with the recent acquisitions of Instagram, Glancee, and Karma, it is perfectly clear that advertisers have avoided chasing consumers’ eyeballs into this medium. While the ad-spend numbers don’t quite match the perceived growth, a closer look shows us that we are actually beginning to enter the golden age of mobile and that the advertising spending will follow. To fully understand this trend, let’s examine the features that characterize the rise of mobile today: its diversity, quality, innovation, experimentation, and cultural influence on society.

The diversity of tactics in the mobile medium is astounding. Advertisers now have an extremely robust palette of mobile tools to choose from to connect their messages and experiences with their desired audiences thanks to advancements in mobile ad units, mobile search, mobile apps, mobile websites, and SMS. Each of these mobile tactics is now being successfully embraced by advertisers to drive brand awareness, consideration, purchases, and loyalty.

The quality of the work is at an all-time high. As a judge at the recent 2012 D&AD (Design and Art Direction) Awards, I received a strong overview of where the industry is heading and it’s clear that some of the best creative and technical minds have finally shifted over to the mobile medium. Brands like Nike and their recent Nike+ Fuelband product shows just how far the quality of the work has come where the Nike+ Fuelband app leverages social platform design, Bluetooth integration, and 3D animations. This is a far cry from when mobile ad units were a brand’s main mobile advertising option. The recent addition of the Mobile Lions to the Cannes Advertising Festival will also continue to accelerate this shift in talent and drive up the quality of mobile work in the upcoming years.

Innovation has accelerated. Recently, each innovative mobile product or service seems to beget the next one as the boundaries of the mobile medium continue to be stretched. In the past year, mobile has seen breakthroughs from the likes of Uber, Clear, Path, and Figure as mobile designers look to leverage location information, gestures, and UI advancements to reduce complexity and provide for more compelling services. In the near future, we’ll also start to see more designers attempt to add voice control and personalization to improve users’ experience on mobile.

Experimentation leads to advances. Recently, the apps, Highlight and Sonar were released at SXSW with much fanfare. Both are considered social discovery apps, which help to monitor your location in the physical world and alert you when “similar” people are in close proximity to you. While, both of those apps have had difficulties gaining traction and overcoming the “creepy” label attached to them, they have fueled the imagination of what is now possible using a combination of GPS, open graph technologies, and the social web to find commonalities between people that were not always immediately obvious. Social discovery apps are leading the experimentation charge as the web evolves to become the ‘personal web’, a web rebuilt around individuals.

Cultural Influence on society. More than 2/3 of our time on mobile phones is now used for non-communication activities with the average American spending 94 minutes per day utilizing mobile apps vs. 72 minutes of web-based consumption. Mobile is poised to surpass television as the dominant consumer access point for all media. How we experience life, relationships, entertainment, education, exercise, and work have been completely transformed (for better or worse) because of mobile.

It’s Still Only the First Inning. Despite mobile’s progress and momentum, we’re still only at the beginning of the golden age of mobile. There is still a huge gap between the rapid adoption of mobile and the budgets assigned to it. Brands will need to more than quadruple their mobile budgets to begin catching up to the level at which consumers are embracing the channel. Statistics also show that globally “dumb-phone” users still outnumber smartphone users 5.6 billion to 835 million, meaning that the “upgrade cycle” to smartphones is still in the early stages.

Imagine a world in the next 2-3 years, where smart phones are in the hands of every consumer and tablet sales will exceed PCs. It will be a world where global internet users will double, led by mobile usage. At that time, mobile will no longer be a support medium, it will be THE medium. Today, we’ve already seen apps disrupt multi-billion dollar industries – gaming, retail, media, publishing, small business, photography, and travel.

At this point, not having a mobile strategy / roadmap in place for your brand is a recipe for disruption. The golden age of mobile is here and will be here for years.

As reported in The Atlantic

Back in the old days, i.e., PF&T (pre-Facebook and Twitter),American Idol fans were still social. Yet instead of status updates and tweets, they did what they could with “the technology of those times,” explained Don Wilcox, Fox’s vp and gm of branded entertainment. That is, if you wanted to debate Justin vs. Kelly, you’d log onto message boards on AmericanIdol.com or, shudder, MySpace “before the exodus,” Wilcox joked.

Now, in this social TV era, the aging Idol franchise appears to have pivoted brilliantly. According to the social analytics firm Bluefin Labs, Idol—which wrapped season 11 last night—generated 5,956,134 total social comments, an all-time record in this medium’s short history.

That’s 121 percent better than NBC’s The Voice, which generated 2,698,460 total comments, despite being the newer and arguably far buzzier show this season.

Of course, Idol also lends itself perfectly to social TV interaction, given its season-long competition and the fact that it airs live. “We’ve always been about giving fans a voice [no pun intended] and cultivating fervor about the show,” said Wilcox. “Last year we really just dipped our toe in social TV, but this year was our first really big push.”

While the show’s high-profile judges and hosts—like Jennifer Lopez and Ryan Seacrest—periodically mention Idol in their social media comments, the big push for social TV presence came from stunts created for the contestants and their rabid fan bases. Rather than just throwing a hashtag up on the screen occasionally, Idol execs looked to capture moments in the show that lent themselves to channel social media activity.

“Our social presence used to be purely digital,” said Wilcox. “This year we used TV to prompt audiences.” For example, during the show, Seacrest periodically urged fans to tweet to #MyIdol to declare their favorite singers, or tweet at #idolbackstage to unlock exclusive content on AmericanIdol.com (once 10,000 fans joined in). “Our intent was to prompt audiences. There were times when we literally clogged up Twitter,” said Wilcox.

While Twitter served as the show’s real-time commenting vehicle, Facebook often took on the role of a gathering place for the show’s 9 million or so viewers.

The show also implemented Facebook’s Open Graph, enabling automatic sharing whenever fans commented or voted on the show. “That really accelerated things,” said Wilcox.

As reported by AdWeek

Along with the headache of making sure TV ads that get bumped by politicals are quickly rescheduled, advertising agencies also will have to cope with the Federal Communications Commission’s controversial new rule requiring TV stations to post online the rates charged for each political ad.

“Rates for the political season could show up in databases and on buyers’ desktops, and other buys would be measured by this,” said John Shelton, the CEO of Strata, a provider of software-based buying tools. “This is more likely to impact the business outside politics rather than the business inside politics.”

Broadcasters warned that having ad-rate data readily available online would put stations at a marked disadvantage as they compete with other local media outlets. It was a concern FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a former newspaper publisher, acknowledged even as she voted for the rule.

The move could leave both buyer and seller with a lot to explain during the hectic advertising season. The concern is that advertisers would demand the same ad rate as others without regard to the specific factors that drove their campaign. “I don’t want this to create more questions about local markets in our clients’ minds that might discourage them not to buy local,” said Maribeth Papuga, an evp and director of local investment for MediaVest.

However, Tony Sweeney, svp, media director at Philadelphia-based LevLane, said there may be an upside in terms of transparency, noting “that level of detail doesn’t typically get discussed.”

As reported by AdWeek

Ad spending on cable is now on par with that allocated to broadcast TV, according to data from Nielsen.

Ad spending on English-language cable-TV networks came to about $21 billion in 2011, roughly even with ad spending on English-language broadcast networks’ $21.1 billion, according to Nielsen.

The figures mark the first time, according to the market-research company, that cable has achieved parity of a sort with its longtime rival. Spending on cable TV has increased steadily over the last few years, up 42% since 2007.

How did cable achieve its growth? The medium has matured, developing more original, quality programming, and winning greater share of audience. As marketers winnowed down their spend on English-language broadcast TV during the recession of 2008 and 2009, cable continued to increase its ad revenue — a testament, perhaps, to the fact that its programming aimed at niche audiences is typically significantly cheaper than what airs on broadcast.

Nielsen

Nielsen said its figures show that cable has essentially caught up with broadcast.

To be sure, broadcast is still bigger than cable. After all, it takes dozens of cable outlets, large and small, to match the earning power of the five big English-language networks. A prime-time ad on NBC, CW, ABC, CBS and Fox is also, in nearly all cases, likely to cost more than a similar promotional berth on a cable outlet.

Nielsen’s data also shows that spot TV has yet to return to its recent 2008 high point of $25 billion in ad revenue. In 2011, the medium took in approximately $23 billion, according to Nielsen. Meanwhile, Spanish-language cable and network TV saw double-digit growth in ad spend, up 24% and 16%, respectively, from 2010.

For those seeking an example of the breakneck pace of the mounting political “call and response” attack cycle, 84 minutes may very well be a new benchmark.

It took a mere one hour and 24 minutes for Mitt Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom to mount a Twitter offensive against Hilary Rosen after the Democratic strategist’s incendiary remarks on CNN last month about Romney’s wife Ann never having worked “a day in her life.”

And the most salient point of all: as responses go, Fehrnstrom’s was slow.

Welcome to the digital democracy, where Twitter has become a veritable particle accelerator for news cycles and political battles. The social media platform has given way to a ceaseless torrent of inside-baseball minutiae and partisan nitpickery. It is the home of meaningless scooplets and high-profile dustups. It is, for better or worse, the center of the political conversation, and it is transforming the way political campaigns and those who cover them do business.

“What happens on Twitter does not stay on Twitter—it is not Las Vegas,” says Peter Greenberger, Twitter’s director of political ad sales in Washington, D.C. And if anyone in Washington has reason to smile these days, it’s him.

“It’s amazing. Rosen’s initial comment was on CNN, but within seconds it exploded on Twitter and you can watch as it grew and grew until it bounced off Twitter and landed on the morning shows, evening news and the front pages of newspapers across the country,” Greenberger recounts.

Part of the reason for Twitter’s accelerated importance in the zeitgeist of political coverage stems from its stunning growth over the past three years. Last March, the company announced that it had achieved 140 million active users, up from 100 million last fall. Every day, Twitter hosts roughly 340 million new tweets.

To put that in perspective, it took Twitter three years, two months and one day to serve up 1 billion tweets; it now does that volume every three days. The New York Times’ David Carr likened Twitter to “a river of data.” Still others compare it to a violent gusher. Call it what you will: The tweets will flow with or without you.

This year’s presidential contest has already been pitched as the first truly digital election, despite the fact that politicos dubbed both the 2004 and 2008 elections as such. With each new election cycle comes proclamations about the latest technology’s impact. In 2004, it was the rise of the blogs. In 2008, CNN and many others asked whether that election would be won or lost on Facebook. This year, Twitter is home base to the political discourse, and journalists have set up shop to make sure they don’t miss a moment.

Read more in AdWeek

We already know that click-through rates on online display ads are abysmal. Now a study from the startup Pretarget and ComScore revealed that even when a user clicks on an ad, the correlation between that click and a conversion is virtually nonexistent.

Over nine months, Pretarget analyzed more than 260 million ad impressions across the campaigns of 18 advertisers, the company said, and tracked conversions ranging from filling out an online form to downloading software. In the analysis, Pretarget found that the Pearson correlation (a common correlation methodology) between clicks and a conversion was 0.01, the lowest correlation rate among metrics tracked in the study (a 0 result would mean there is absolutely no correlation, while 1.0 would signify the strongest possible correlation.)

At the high end of the correlation spectrum for the metrics tracked was what the companies referred to as “ad hover/interaction,” or when a web user moves his or her cursor over an ad, thus “engaging” with it. That interaction registered a correlation of 0.49.

The study found a slightly weaker but still significant correlation between viewable impressions and conversion, coming in with a Pearson result of 0.35. Gross impressions served registered a modest correlation of 0.17.

The findings lend credence to those who have long said it’s time that the industry makes a serious move away from measuring campaign success based on click-throughs, the foundation of online display advertising that’s looking more flawed by the day.

“My key takeaway,” said Pretarget founder and CEO Keith Pieper, “is that optimizing to viewable impressions or hover time is a better proxy for a brand advertiser than a click-through rate.”

Pretarget used ComScore’s validated Campaign Essentials product to gather data on viewability and “ad hovering.” Pretarget, which helps advertisers target web users who have searched online for a specific keyword, used a demand-side platform to collect data on clicks as well conversion data based on cookies.

Kirby Winfield, senior VP-corporate development at Comscore, said the findings could push direct-response marketers to focus on metrics that have largely been the domain of brand advertising.

“Metrics like ‘hover’ and ‘view’ that have typically been thought of as more brand-focused metrics actually can end up being superappropriate for direct marketers,” he said.

ComScore did not underwrite the study.

As reported in AdAge