You Do This More Than Sleeping And Working

People spend more than half of their day consuming media.

Making a statement like that should make you look at this Blog post with your head titled sideways and your eyebrows raised – the way a dog looks when you talk to it. I can’t make this stuff up. "Citing a new Ipsos OTX study of 7,000 online consumers ages 13 to 74, Friend said that thanks to smartphones and laptops, people are now spending one-half of their waking days interacting with media, and have increased their media consumption by an hour per day over the last two years. That’s more time than they spend working or sleeping," says the news item, Ipsos OTX Study: People Spend More Than Half Their Day Consuming Media, from The Wrap.

Imagine that.

Human beings have a voracious appetite when it comes to information – no one can deny that. If you ever thought that we may, in fact, cross the chasm that Clay Shirky laid out in his recently released best-selling business book, Cognitive Surplus, this new piece of information might lead you to think differently. Imagine the cognitive surplus we’re actually creating if this statistic is true. Imagine what we could do with this time if we were not passively sitting back and just consuming media. Not only do people love consuming media, but it seems like the more platforms, channels and hardware we add into the equation, the more consumption happens across them. Think back and ask yourself if you ever really thought you would be consuming as much media as you are on your mobile device? It wasn’t that long ago when even the concept of consuming media on a mobile phone seemed almost as ridiculous as sharing your every mundane action in a 140-character tweet on Twitter.

Things get even murkier and more interesting…

Bruce Friend, President of Ipsos OTX MediaCT, went on to say: "Communicating is now entertaining, and entertainment is communication The speed at which things can be delivered thanks to broadband, and the ways it can be delivered, with DVR and VOD, mean that the speed of change has ramped up in an unprecedented way." Twitter and Facebook are great examples of this. They’re not just platforms to communicate, they are places that entertain us – much in the same way a television or radio show does. Pushing his comments further, the advent of the DVR and VOD lets people consume more of what they like much more frequently. You no longer have to choose one program over another. You no longer have to wait until a certain time during the week to watch a specific show. Because you can record everything or watch it on demand, we tend to fill our time with even more content (and media consumption).

The Internet is not killing television.

If anything, it is having more choices that is driving more and more consumption. It’s our ability to fill those smaller time slots (like any idle moment of waiting in your life) with some form of media/entertainment (be it a quick glance of a Twitter feed or checking the sport scores on your mobile device). The more we continue to untether and be free of fixed locations, the more we will continue to see this trend in media consumption rise.

Think about what this all means when it comes to Marketing, Advertising and Communications. What do you think this all means?