CHildren’s Media Odysseys
The evolving media mix of Kids ages 6 to 17
Through the Lenses of Arbitron’s PPM Cross media Information & MindShare’s Online RESEARCH Panel
By
Roberta M. McConochie, Ph.D. Arbitron Inc.
Debbie Solomon, MindShare
Abstract
MindShare’s Online Research panel, MORe, and Arbitron’s PPM test panel in Philadelphia identify key points of relevance to media planners as well as media sellers for both short term and longer term business decisions. For example…
- Both media use and media-multi-tasking increase with age. These dual trends imply increasing dynamic flow of attentiveness to individual media, a challenge for vehicle programmers as well as for the buying side.
- Results confirm that content preferences change with age and also provide a first look at the different shapes of age-content relationships. These vary considerably for different contents. Content preferences also reflect complex interactions between age and gender.
- The data also underscore the importance of measuring the individual consumer, e.g. the child, rather than the media device. The prevalence of children’s away-from-home viewing strongly suggests its inclusion in media measurement. Results also point to the need for more passive approaches rather than active measurement, at least in part because of increasing media multi-tasking as children enter their tween and teen years.
Introduction
Background
Research on children’s uses of media is limited, particularly as a guide to media planning. Though key texts offer intelligence on children’s development of cognitive and emotional abilities or on marketing to children[1] none ties together child development with media as a practical guide to marketing. Moreover, available children’s research often features small samples and design procedures more appropriate for adults than young people.[2] Children under the age of 12 are not measured at all by the existing Radio Currency in the USA. The available TV data for younger media users via people meters, diaries, or other methods are often filtered by parents or older siblings.
Better research on children’s uses of media is critical for three reasons:
- Children’s media behavior provides a bellwether on media-use evolution for the entire population.
- The burgeoning children’s market consumes ever increasing adspend.
- Children are seen increasingly as key communications conduits to families.
The Industry needs more and better research on children’s use of media to effectively, program, plan and buy; and also to consider long range strategic paths implied by younger groups as they age. Children’s uses of media thus represent a vital thread through the labyrinth of the media mix.
Methods and Key Questions
The complementary MORe and PPM research programs shed light on the cross-media behavior of Children, including kids’ multi-tasking media consumption.
PPM methods have been described extensively in previous ARF and ESOMAR publications.[3] Most importantly for children’s measurement, participation is nearly passive. It focuses on the child, not on the media device. Children need only wear their meters. They do not write down anything, push any buttons, or attempt to identify the media entities they hear. Nor do they require assistance from a parental gatekeeper to capture their media exposures. Thus, the PPM approach is a potentially less biased method than conventional active research to capture children’s media use.
Results report information from the 2002-2003 Philadelphia PPM panel. During the PPM evaluation, the in-tab count of children 6 – 17 averaged just under 200. Though these are relatively small numbers, the PPM panel method features repeated measures of the same consumers over time. Thus these average daily estimates build upon hundreds of daily data points for each child’s results. All data are reported for the entire Philadelphia DMA for both Radio and Television. Most of the PPM results use the most recent PPM data, from Winter 2003. A few results use other surveys when specific age-sex breaks required more stability from larger repeated measures in-tab.
During the 2002-2003 PPM test panel in Philadelphia, virtually all local radio and TV stations were encoded and so were captured by PPM measurement. For cable, the vast majority of large cable-reach channels, 28 of them, were also encoded. However, several important children-targeted channels were not encoded, most notably Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, and ABC Family. For perspective, these three networks represent about one quarter of children’s daytime viewing and about 15% for Teenagers. Thus the children’s ratings and time estimates in this report are likely to understate total viewing, representing roughly 80% of total. This potential understatement feeds into the results interpretation below.
All PPM estimates are reported as average quarter-hour data, despite the fact that PPM data are precise to the minute level. The AQH reporting facilitates comparisons with currency and has been the reporting standard during the testing phase. Also, given the focus of the present research on Children 6-17, most PPM estimates in this report focus on 6am to 10pm daily media-use data.
The MORe (MindShare On-line Research) panel is MindShare's proprietary on-line research tool administered by Lightspeed Research. The results in this paper come from the January 2003 wave of the MORe Nationwide Youth Panel Omnibus. This includes data from 397 8-12 year olds and 400 13-17 year olds.[4] The MORe results represent the online population of the USA, rather than the total population of children, although, at the time of this writing, 74% of homes with children have on-line access.[5]
Key research questions include:
- What is the media mix of Radio and Television for Children?
- How does the mix vary among the younger vs. older Children and Teens?
- How do the children describe their media mix? What do they report about their media multi-tasking?
- How does Internet use fit into the Radio-TV combinations?
Results
Expectations: Age and Gender Effects
Parents, siblings, and other mentors govern most children’s first exposures to media. As children mature, they increasingly control their own media choices and venues. They also increasingly develop content preferences and specific media-use behaviors, e.g. channel switching. Children’s media uses evolve as they develop physically, acquiring precise motor skills, e.g. required to operate a remote control and surf the web. Media uses also change as children acquire the cognitive, social, and emotional intelligence platforms to launch their personal tastes and the ability to search and screen in accord with their emerging identities and increasingly differentiated preferences.
We therefore expect to see age and gender effects on media behavior. The present results help describe and understand children’s evolving media behavior and consider the implications for short term and longer term planning.
TV Viewing Prevalent both at Home and Away; Older Kids Show More “Own Bedroom” Watching, according to MORe Results
MORe asks where kids watch television. Many of the responses are pervasive across younger and older children. For example both younger children (8-12) and older teens (13-17) report similarly high percents of TV viewing in the living room (77% for the younger children and 74% for teens). And similarly large proportions of older and younger children report TV viewing away from home: over half report watching TV out of home. Slightly over a third cite viewing in someone else’s home (37% for 8-12 years and 35% for teens); and over one fifth mention other out of home TV use (22% for 8-12 and 21% for teens).
In contrast to the pervasiveness of living room and out of home viewing over the age groups, teens and younger children differ in the extent of viewing in their own rooms. Only about half of this online panel’s Children 8 – 12 report watching in their own bedrooms in contrast to nearly two thirds of Teens 13-17 (54% for Children 8 – 12 vs. 67% for teens). No discernable gender effects occurred for the location of TV viewing.
Table 1
“Where do you watch TV?”
Percent by demographic
Living Room / Bedroom TV / Someone Else's Home / Other Out of HomeKids 8-12 / 77 / 54 / 37 / 22
Kids 13-17 / 74 / 67 / 35 / 21
* MORe, January 2003: In response to question, “Where do you watch TV?”Insert Figure 1 here –Kids’ TV Venues
Listening Alone & with Friends also Increases with Age
As expected, children’s experiences of radio also evolve over time to become less family/parent oriented and more individual or peer oriented. In contrast to the quarter of younger online children who report listening with a parent, only one in ten teens confess to this (26% for 8-12 vs. 10% for teens). While parents decrease as children’s radio mates, solitary listening and listening with friends increase.. For younger children, one in ten report listening alone or with friends (11% for each). In contrast, twice as many teens report these more mature radio behaviors, 25% listening alone and 21% listening with friends.
Table 2
“With whom do you listen to radio?”
Percent by demographic
Alone / With Parent / With FriendsKids 8-12 / 13 / 26 / 11
Kids 13-17 / 25 / 10 / 21
* MORe, January 2003: In response to question, “Who do you listen with sometimes/always?”
Younger Girls Report More Listening Alone than Boys
Though about the same proportions of girls and boys listen with their parents and friends, we see gender differences in solitary listening: for both younger children and for teens, more girls than boys listen on their own. Among the children 8 – 12, nearly twice as many girls listen alone (9% for boys vs. 17% for girls). Similarly, more teenage girls listen on their own than boys (18% for boys vs. 30% for girls).
Table 3
“Whom do you listen with sometime/always?”
Percent by demographic
Alone - Girls / Alone - BoysKids 8-12 / 17 / 9
Kids 13-17 / 30 / 18
* MORe, January 2003: In response to question, “Who do you listen with sometimes/always?”
Online Teens Report More TV Multi-Tasking Than Younger Children; Small Gender Effects
The ability to follow two topics more or less simultaneously requires a fairly advanced level of cognitive and memory coordination. It is therefore not surprising that teens report more accompaniments to their TV viewing than younger children. Consistent with their online orientation, the majority of these children reported using the PC or the Web as a frequent accompaniment to TV viewing. A majority also mentioned magazine reading as a frequent side dish for TV. Over half of the younger children mentioned these (50% for PC/Web and 54% for magazines). In contrast and as expected, more teens mentioned these activities (67% for PC/Web and 66% for magazines). Given the attention demands of both PC use and magazine reading, results imply a flow of attentiveness from one medium to the other. This flow is obviously important both to the media programmers and to the buying side.
Two other activities also garnered expected mentions. Instant Messaging, no stranger to these online children, was mentioned by nearly a quarter of younger kids and over half of teens. Radio was mentioned as a TV accompaniment by a quarter of younger children and a third of teens.
The obvious conclusion to these multitasking results is that children, particularly these PC savvy kids, may not consistently “watch” with their eyes or ears on the TV program.
Table 4
“Other activities with TV viewing”
Percent by demographic
Radio Listening / Instant Messaging / PC orWeb / Reading Magazine
Kids 8-12 / 21 / 22 / 50 / 54
Kids 13-17 / 34 / 56 / 67 / 66
* MORe, January 2003: When watch TV, what other activities sometimes/always do?
Gender effects were relatively small and inconsistent for TV multi-tasking. These small effects concentrated on instant messaging and PC use.
Boys showed slightly but consistently higher PC/Web use while watching TV than did girls at both age levels, 8 – 12 and 13-17. Conversely, girls reported slightly more Instant Messaging than boys for both age groups.
Radio Multi-Tasking Shows Age Effects, Small Gender Impact
As with television, the most frequently mentioned accompaniments to radio, according to these online children, are magazine reading and PC/Web use. Next in line is Instant messaging, particularly for teens, followed by TV viewing.
Age exerted a strong impact on the radio accompaniments. Over half of the younger children reported magazine reading and PC/Web use, in contrast to about three quarters of the teens. About one fourth of the younger children reported instant messaging or TV viewing as their TV accompaniment. Over half of the teens cited instant messaging and over a third cited TV viewing.
Table 5
“Other activities with radio listening”
Percent by demographic
TVViewing / Instant Messaging / PC or
Web / Reading Magazine
Kids 8-12 / 25 / 28 / 57 / 62
Kids 13-17 / 38 / 64 / 79 / 74
* MORe, January 2003: When hear radio, what other activities sometimes/always do?
As with TV multi-tasking, gender effects on radio accompaniments were slight. There was virtually no gender difference in the levels of PC/Web use with radio. As with TV, girls showed consistently somewhat higher levels of Instant Messaging across both age groups.
Instant Messaging: Older Girls May Rule
Both the TV and Radio multi-tasking results (Tables 4 – 5) replicate a user profile: many more teens than children 8 – 12 use this service and more girls than boys take part. These results have implications for marketers concerning the effectiveness of targeting via this real time communication vehicle.
PC/Web Multi-Tasking also Shows Age Impact, little Gender Effect
As with Radio and TV multi-tasking, teens pack in more simultaneous activities than younger children. Not surprisingly, audio streams are most mentioned as an accompaniment to PC/Web use. Audio tape/CD Listening and radio listening were mentioned by about half of younger children report these vs. about three quarters of teens. Television accompaniment comes in a close third. And magazine reading is mentioned by a smaller number of online children, possibly and arguably as an accompaniment to slow downloads.
Table 6
“Other activities with PC/Web use”
Percent by demographic
TVViewing / Radio Listening / Tape/CD Listening / Reading Magazine
Kids 8-12 / 46 / 52 / 56 / 7
Kids 13-17 / 56 / 72 / 80 / 18
* MORe, January 2003: When use PC, what other activities sometimes/always?
MORe Results Provide the Context for PPM Radio & TV Results
Results from MindShare’s online research provide the context – of where and how children use radio and TV and what else they do while they attend to these media. We now look to Arbitron’s PPM results to see when and to what extent kids use Radio and Television and what contents they prefer.
PPM vis-à-vis Present Radio & TV Currency Measurement
As has been shown in previous ARF and ESOMAR presentations, the PPM Radio estimates for teenagers 12 – 17 and for adults generally resemble the quarter-hour data for Arbitron’s diary-currency measurement. However, the PPM radio information provides considerably more granularity of stations, episodes, and per-station time listening.[6] PPM data also contribute greater precision of start and stop times than the diary method is capable of achieving. In addition, PPM captures the Radio listening of Children 6 – 11, a group not included in diary-based currency surveys.
In Television, the PPM estimates generally exceed the present meter-diary currency [7] , in part because PPM tracks consumers wherever they go, in and out of home. The results attest to the considerable potential for out of home TV use for children. Over half of the children and teenagers in the MORe survey reported watching at friends’ homes or other locations away from home (Table 1).
Other limitations of current set-based, diary measurement have been noted above in the methods section. The authors believe that the PPM television data reported here may suffer less measurement bias than the present TV currency in Philadelphia, particularly for children and teens.
Age and Gender Effects Expected for Media Estimates
We expect that PPM media measures will show age effects, related to the cognitive, social and emotional development of children. Additionally, we expect to see gender impacts as children’s identities increasingly reflect sexual maturation and cultural expectations. Because of the vast range of media contents, however, the impact of age and gender and their related lifestyle variations may not produce simple monotonic increases or decreases in media-use levels.
Age Effects Varied: Radio Use Increases with Age; So Does Broadcast TV; Cable Use Appears to Drop with Age
As expected, there are age effects for total-day radio listening. For the broad age groups, increases in listening go hand in hand with increases in age. Younger children listen less than Teens 13 - 17; Teens listen less than Persons 18+. The daylong average Persons Using Radio (or PUR) rating for Children 8 –12 is 6 vs. 8 for Teens 13 – 17, vs. 14 for Persons 18+ for all Philadelphia stations.