Media Pros Dig Digital

A new study from the Media Behavior Institute found that media pros rely heavily on digital media.  The study is based on a nonrandom sample of media industry executives in the US, who were asked to self-report all of their media usage during a typical day at work on a mobile app-based diary.  Their reports were then compared to a general population sample that used the same diary method, but for a 10-day period.  The nonrandom sampling in both means you can't generalize precise proportions to the larger population, but can be helpful in tracking trends, and to differentiate samples if there are big differences.
  And big differences there were -

• media pros spent more than half their waking hours interacting with email, and more than a quarter of their day accessing the Internet (consumers averaged 20% of day with email, 15% online)
• more than 90% of media pros use mobile apps during the typical working day, and that consumes 11% of their waking hours (for consumers, only 25% used mobile apps, totaled 6% of waking hours)
• half of working pros used social networks, and that accounted for 19% of their waking hours (for consumers, less than 20% use social networks on a typical day, and it accounts for 7% of their time awake)
• while the sample proportions who reported watching TV during a typical day were close (media pros 75%, consumers 85%), consumers spent much more time watching TV (26% of the day for consumers vs. 9% for working pros)

The report also found a number of interesting discrepancies where both media pros and consumers spent about the same proportion of their days using a particular medium, but where there were big differences in the reported likelihood of using that medium on a typical day.

• some 42% of the working pros read some form of print during their day, while only 25% of the consumer sample read something printed on a typical day.  Interestingly, the amount of time spent reading print was roughly the same - around 5% of their waking day.
• working pros and consumers spent about the same percentage of their days using tablets (7%), although media pros were almost three times as likely to own a tablet
• both samples reported about the same averages of time spent listening to radio (around a quarter of their waking hours), but consumers were almost twice as likely to listen to the radio (80%) as were working pros (42%)

Presenting these findings at MPG's Collaborative Alliance session at Advertising Week, MBI's Mike Bloxham noted the limits of the "media pros" results (small nonrandom sample) before noting that the differences were big enough to strongly suggest that media pros use media differently than the average consumer.

Bloxham said that while some of those skews represent “professionally appropriate biases,” given the fact that media pros need to utilize new media in order to evaluate their potential impact, etc., it’s reasonable to conclude that their behaviors and habits likely influence the way they think about consumer media usage too.
“We all view the world from our own eyes,” he said. “If we find as a community that we are markedly different from the communities that we are trying to communicate with and engage for our brand clients, that is a real challenge.”

Source -  Study Reveals Media Pros Have Digital Media Bias (And Explains Why You're Probably Reading This Via Email,  MediaDailyNews