Jeff Cole is director of the UCLA Center for Communications Policy and principal investigator for the World Internet Project, the leading long-term study of Internet use around the globe. At the February iMedia Brand Summit, Cole spoke with Upstream Group's Doug Weaver about the soon-to-be-released results from the fourth year of the study and took questions from the audience. It was an energetic and thought-provoking session, and here is the second of a 3-part series that will let you listen in (click here to see Cole's presentation slides; click here to read part one of this series).
JC: So where does [Internet use] time come from? Single biggest block: television. We know, and we’ll talk in a minute or two, about multitasking, and we know people do watch television while they’re online. But the single biggest place, one of the most dramatic findings we found from day one of our work, was that Internet users watch considerably less -- about 28 percent less -- television, and that’s continued to drop a little bit more. They still watch a lot of television. Internet users now watch a tiny bit more television than the time they spend on the Internet, but considerably less than nonusers.
Our data last month showed that was true in 16 countries, every country we had data for around the world, from Korea and China to Britain and Germany and Hungary -- Internet users watching less television.
A tougher question to get at -- it’s easy to show that Internet users watch less television -- is the time coming from television, and the way we do our work by tracking individual users, we can look at how much television they watched as a nonuser, as a modem user, as a broadband user. The time is coming from there.
It’s not coming from socializing. The Internet users spend as much time talking, spending face-to-face time with their family, a little more time with their friends. Some people would argue that all of this instant messengering and e-mail and cell phones mean you don’t spent time with your friends. Teenagers in particular use those technologies to communicate with their friends when they can’t be with them face to face -- actually increases their communication.
One other place we’re starting to see a little bit of the time for the Internet come from -- and this only started to occur in year three -- is from print. First two years, Internet users spent as much time with newspapers or magazines as nonusers did. Starting to drop, about an hour, hour and fifteen minutes a week now seems to be coming from print as well. So those are the two major places.
Although we found one thing -- it’s I think one of the most interesting findings from our whole work as far as television displacement is concerned, we found modem use, which I think everybody knows is this disruptive activity. People go online 20, 30 minutes at a time, usually go into another room in the house, although not always, and generally going online with a modem, which people view as a big deal, and write down on an envelope or a Post-it note what they want to do when they want to go online. They forget to do one of those things. They get mad at themselves, even though going online takes 30 seconds. But we found that modem use displaces television programming viewing. People go in the other room and it’s a half-hour, they’re generally not talking to their family or not watching a television program.
What really has been compelling to us is broadband use. Broadband users on not 20, 30 minutes in most cases but two minutes, three minutes, sometimes even less, this integrative activity that comes between the rhythms of the day. We found that broadband use doesn’t displace television programming viewing. Broadband use, probably even more frightening for my friends at the network, displaces television advertising viewing. It becomes the thing people are doing during the commercial, and long-term, I think the consequences of that can be devastating.
And I would argue -- it’s not an issue we have to get into here -- television advertising has been in trouble for a generation. The Internet is just one more thing on top of remote controls, VCRs, PVRs, cable channels and everything else.
DW: So while Internet users are not losing sleep, network TV executives are.
JC: TV executives are both losing viewers and losing sleep.
People are More Comfortable Online
JC: Two or three quick themes. I hope you can read these, but if not, I’ll just refer to them very quickly. Just a couple of things that we think relate to some of what you’re interested in. One of the few things to change dramatically over the four years of our work -- and we’re going to release our fourth year report in about a month. This has a little bit of data from it.
One of the few things that really, where the change has been more than incremental, is people’s comfort level online. We asked people to rate their ability on the Internet. In year one of our work, 44 percent rated their skill level as good or excellent. In year four, that’s up to 71 percent, not quite doubling.
What people are finding, of course, is the Internet is not very complex or difficult. But what’s important is as they gain that comfort level, they start moving and trying different things when they realize that a misstep online doesn’t mean they’re going to blow up their computer, their neighborhood, or their country. They start experimenting with downloading. They start experimenting with putting attachments, going to places where they’re less familiar with and trying all kinds of -- even clicking on things -- and this has really been a fairly dramatic change. People very quickly, especially older people who stay off largely because of fear, go on and find those fears are unfounded, that they can really get through the system very quickly.
DW: This is a judgment question on your part, but is it just user familiarity, or is it because the interfaces and the way the Web is put together is better than it was a few years ago?
JC: I think it’s somewhat familiarity, but I think in truth, the Internet is intuitive -- the Worldwide Web part of the Internet. We’re not talking about chat rooms -- fairly easy to navigate, and I think really well constructed and I think gotten much better constructed. I think that’s the majority of it -- that most things can be done remarkably simply.
UCLA takes credit for being the birthplace of the Internet, something they didn’t take credit for till about five years ago… and the guys, some of the people who were there... the Internet they used, or the Arpanet, you really did need a Ph.D. in engineering to understand how to navigate. This really is a remarkably simple medium, and people are figuring that out really fast.
Nothing is more simple than television, but this isn’t that far behind. Television, on/off switch, change the channel. But this isn’t that far behind. The problem with the Internet is the PC and having all the programming and all the putting programs on. That’s the part that needs to be fixed. The actual Internet use is remarkably simple.
Online Shopping and Browsing Feels Safer
DW: Well, the focus of this conference, of course, is advertising and marketing. So I wanted to see if you could share some insights with the advertisers who are in the room and look at the obstacles and the opportunities for them as they reach out to this empowered consumer.
JC: We have a huge amount of data on advertising and marketing. So we can only touch a small part of it, and I don’t know if people know, we release a lot of this publicly, which I can give the Website later, but we found -- I think the news on advertising, marketing, and e-commerce -- even the news on security and privacy -- pretty good this year.
Finding a lot more awareness, a lot more willingness to try things, to buy things, to look at things. We’ve seen a real movement from shopping online and buying in stores to both shopping and buying online -- more displacement from retail stores than ever before -- people really using the Internet to collect information.
But on the subject of opportunity and where advertisers and marketers may want to look that they haven’t looked before, I think one of the most interesting and really remarkable developments we found came from broadband. We noticed something notional that we began testing for. Turned out really to be quite remarkable, something the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have given a lot of attention to, based on some of our work.
We found that when people have had broadband -- this was the early broadband users -- more than two years, the PC or the Internet access device tended to migrate from the den or the bedroom into the kitchen. If you think about it, the kitchen is the mostly humanly networked room in the house. When you walk in your house from the garage or the front door -- you may walk through a hallway -- the kitchen’s usually the first room you stop in and usually the last room you’re in before you leave. It’s where a lot of people leave their keys, their wallets. It’s where most people have their answering machines.
And the reason broadband accelerated this was the always on function of broadband, which turned out long term to be far more important than the speed. The fact that it was there or let people integrate it into their lives.
But what we found where advertising and marketing is concerned is that people using the PC in the kitchen really provides unique opportunities that a lot of marketers are starting to take advantage of and be aware of -- of reaching people right where they can use information, where advertising makes a difference, and I think that’s probably the most interesting marketing piece to come out of the work we’re doing.
DW: You mentioned the displacement of retail shopping via the Web. Is it too early to make the prediction that online is really a good place for point of purchase advertising and promotion?
JC: About two thirds of people -- and it’s more urban than rural, as you’d expect -- say they’re shopping less in retail stores. But the majority of those say they’re shopping just somewhat less. Of the two thirds who say they’re shopping less, only about a third of them say they’re shopping a lot less. So it’s not having a huge impact on point of purchase yet, but clearly . . .
One of the reasons for that, incidentally, the barrier to change there, one of the most puzzling things coming out of our work -- and I’ve seen this in other people’s work as well -- something I totally disagree with, Internet users, Internet shoppers, do not believe with any conviction that prices are lower online. You ask people why they buy. The 24 hours. They buy because of the availability of goods. In year one of our work, they didn’t buy because of the lack of human faces and voices. In year three, they were buying because of the lack of human faces and voices. They came to like that, although they make it clear that they like shopping without humans unless they want a human. When something goes wrong, they want one.
But all these reasons why people buy, the prices being lower are not, and we do focus groups. We find that almost nobody knows how to use a shopping (bot?). They don’t know how to search out items. They’re not afraid to buy from strange merchants they’ve never heard of. They were afraid of that in year one. But the price barrier in people’s minds is a reason they’re still not buying to the degree I would think they would be.
DW: I want to talk about multitasking, and by the way, if you want to jump ahead to any slides here, just go ahead.
JC: Actually, just the one just on buying online. I said there’s good news. We asked people -- we get into all their buying behavior, why they buy, how they buy, what they buy. But the one slide I brought here was asking people, “Eventually, do you think you’ll buy many things online?” and in year one of our work, that was 54 percent, over half, still pretty optimistic, thought that eventually they'd buy a lot more. In year three, it was up to 71 percent. Year four it’s up to 76 percent. Over three quarters expect that they’re going to buy a lot more online.
Surprising News About Multitasking
JC: With regard to multitasking, really interested in this because television didn’t start with multitasking. In 1948 through 1960, families sat down together -- usually, they only had one television -- and watched television together. It took families a long time -- and for televisions sets to get less expensive and more reliable so they moved them throughout the house -- for us now to figure out how to have dinner in front of the television set, to read in front of the TV set, or now God knows what in front of the television set.
But the Internet from day one was multitasking. We found over 50 percent of Internet users were either watching television or on the telephone, listening to the radio, or instant messengering, which I consider a multitask. That wasn’t a great shock that over 50 percent regularly do that. What really became interesting is we found that about a third of those people, about a third of all Internet users, were doing three or more things at the same time, not two or more but three or more, juggling those.
If you talk to teenagers, they will tell you that they’re doing all those things with equal comprehension. We tried -- this isn’t the work. I’m not an educational psychologist. I tend to think that we multitask the way we watch picture-in-picture, which is we put 90 percent of our attention on one thing and 10 percent on the little screen on the bottom, and when the little screen captures our attention, we flip the 90/10. That’s the way we do it.
There’s some evidence -- and once again, I said I’m not a psychologist -- that just as kids can learn language at the age of 3 or 4 in a way that we as adults can’t, that if children start multitasking from the time they’re two or three -- and most of us only do it when we’re much older -- that maybe they can better train their brains to absorb more information. We know that women multitask better than men. That’s not a gender stereotype. That’s verifiable. So there’s some potential that kids who have been raised on this from the very earliest ages -- they’re still pretty young, though -- may actually be able to multitask better than us. But whether people comprehend or not, we’re doing it.
DW: Now, is one of the things that you’re seeing with multitasking a lot of TV and Internet use simultaneously?
JC: Absolutely. The Internet seems to lend itself to that. It’s always television or radio or telephone or instant messaging.
Monday: Privacy, trust and more ways broadband changes everything.
