Measuring Media Usage >> Counting Combinations

The Intersection interviewed Don Schultz, professor emeritus in service of Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill, and president of Agora, a global marketing consultancy in Evanston.

His teaching has focused on communication integration, branding and the financial measures of marketing and communication. He has been looking at the way people process media, especially the simultaneous use of media.

Intersection Question (IQ): You've determined that people process information sequentially and in parallel form. Can you tell us what that means exactly?

Schultz: There are two kinds of people. People who process things sequentially and most of us who are over the age of say, 25, all grew up processing things sequentially. We learned to read, word after word after word.
We turn the page read another word and so on so it's all sequential. What's happened in the last 15-20 years, is that we have surrounded people with communication. And as a result, they've learned to process things in parallel. If you look at younger people they think of nothing of looking at multiple things at the same time. So they process media in multiple ways, simultaneously.

If you have a teenage child and you go into their room, you find them sitting at their computer, with the radio and television both on, they're flipping through a magazine and talking on a cell phone. Ask what they're doing, they will tell you they are studying. But they really are. They are processing all of this information simultaneously and in multiple forms. This is called polychronic processing. All I've done is apply it this to the new media systems.

IQ: Does this apply to short and long form content?

Schultz: It doesn't seem to matter. Actually, I would suggest that by and large, young people, under the age of 25, don't process information in long form. Sounds good, but that's not what they do. Essentially they work off of sound bites. They take little bits of information and they string them together. So what you find, for example in a classroom, is students who have knowledge which is a 1,000 miles wide and a quarter of an inch deep.

But they don't need long form or long explanations because we've given them techniques and approaches and methodologies so that they don't need that. All I need to know is the topic and, I know what to do, I go to my laptop and I type in G-O-O-G-L-E and in two-tenths of a second everything I need to know is right there in front of me.

So this idea of long form and short form - and involvement and non-involvement were all developed for when we had different forms of media.

IQ: How might these media consumption insights affect the way companies produce advertising and journalism in the future?

Schultz: One of the things it does is gives us a whole different view of the whole concept of media and media usage. Historically, we've gone out and asked people questions -- Have you seen this magazine? Did you read this newspaper? That sort of thing. We don't really know how much time they spent with it. We don't know what they took out of it. We don't really know how they used it and in what combination with what other media forms. Remember, all of our media measurement up until this point have been measured separately. Television, magazines, newspapers and radio. But we never looked at them in combination. Everything today is still measured individually by medium so I can tell you that people spent this much time with Channel 7 and this much time with Channel 2 but I can't tell you that these people who watch television also read magazines. I don't have that kind of information.

IQ: This is useful for what end of what businesses?

Schultz: This is useful for people who are developing communication, advertising and marketing. The real issue in all of this is how these things work in combination. It's not how one individual media form works. It's how they work in combination. How do television and newspapers interact? How do Ipods and magazines interact? How do people use these things in creating combinations of media forms. This is important not only to the person developing the form and writing the story but also for the advertiser in terms of how the combinations are put together. From a journalistic side, if I want to understand the people who are watching television - I need to know that they are probably doing something else and it forces me to think about what's happening when I am not particularly engaging them and they are going off and doing something else at the same time.

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Posted on March 6, 2007 04:25 PM | Permalink

Comments

As usual Don is right on the money. My main comment is that I think the parallel statement extends up to age 50.

Posted by: Dan Williams | March 8, 2007 08:35 AM

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