Last week the Council for Research Excellence (CRE) released the results of a new $3.5 million study sponsored by Nielsen titled “Media Behavior in America” focused on media usage and behavior, or more basically the amount of “consumer exposure” to “any of four categories of screens.”

1. Traditional television (including live TV, DVR playback, DVD/VCR).
2. Computer (including Web use, e-mail, video, etc.).
3. Mobile devices (including Web use, text messaging and video).
4. “All other screens” (including display screens, in-cinema movies and GPS navigation units).

Given the multiplatform focus of this blog, I wanted to quickly cover the results of this study.

Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting and member of the CRE, remarked that the results are “amazingly consistent across all the ages.” Overall over 67% of media time is spent with a television, close to six hours a day on average with just over five hours dedicated to live TV viewing. At 16 minutes of commercial time per hour this means that an average viewers sees over 80 minutes of commercials and promos each day, demonstrating the medium’s importance to advertising.

Computer and mobile usage was much less frequent, occupying less than a third of the total media activity. According to this study on average viewers saw only 1.2 hours of video online per month. Another recent study, by comScore, gauged that viewers saw five hours of video online per month. I am not sure how to explain this difference between the two studies. The CRE study was sponsored by Nielsen and was overseen by an independent board of advertisers, television executives and other industry experts. Regardless, both studies demonstrate that monthly online video viewing is a fraction of daily television viewing, indicating that television will probably remain the dominant advertising medium for quite some time.

Perhaps most importantly, this study demonstrates that the public is consuming media at a greater rate, perhaps since there are so many more options for them to choose from. From an advertising point of view this is both an opportunity and a challenge; an opportunity since their targets are more accessible than ever; a challenge because campagins will require coordination across different screens along with precise segment targeting.