Dive Brief:
- Research from Yahoo found that mobile devices best TV across a range of soft attention metrics such as getting distracted and multi-tasking while engaged with the medium.
- Though the study pointed out that ad budgets are still skewed toward TV at 40.5% and digital (including mobile) only at 33.8%, the study also found that 47.3% of consumer's time was spent on mobile devices, while only 36% of time was spent on TV.
- In terms of distraction, digital wins hands down over TV with consumer attention directed to another device 57% of the time when a TV ad appeared, and only 25% of the time when a digital ad appeared on a smartphone. That number dropped to only 15% for ads on a laptop.
Dive Insight:
Another area where digital demanded more attention than TV is multi-tasking. People watching TV multi-tasked with digital devices 84% of the time – 58% working on laptops, 24% on mobile devices and 2% on both with the most common time for multi-tasking at prime time. For marketers, knowing that users are more likely to skip out on viewing an ad on TV versus on mobile should give guidance in terms of their future ad buying.
Based on these results Yahoo recommended, "Mobile is the new prime time vehicle of choice. Maximize viewer attention by incorporating native video ads into your next campaign. These ads have led to a 28% lift in purchase intent."
The research also found that 53% of smartphone ads elicited an emotional response compared to 43% of TV ads.
"Advertisers should take advantage of the heightened emotional receptivity smartphones deliver for advertising during the entire day, as it is a more efficient buy when compared to prime time TV," Yahoo suggested.
Last year Yahoo conducted research into digital video viewing and found mobile is flying past desktop and laptop. That research found smartphone video views are up 55% and tablet views up 48%, both surpassing PC and laptop views, which are up 34% year-over-year.