Made for TV: how direct has found a new audience

When was the last time you focused solely on watching TV? If you own a tablet or smartphone, then you’ll know TV viewing has transformed from a passive pastime to a dynamic, interactive activity. But how is this trend manifesting itself among consumers in the UK?

In August 2013, Ofcom published its annual research on the UK comms sector. Here’s a quick summary of how people are watching and interacting with TV via tablet and smartphone:

Just over half (53%) of all UK adults are regular ‘media multi-taskers’ i.e. they ‘stack’ or ‘mesh’ while watching TV weekly or more often. One-quarter (25%) of all UK adults regularly engage in media-meshing (interacting or communicating about the TV content they are viewing) and around half (49%) are regularly media-stacking (conducting unrelated media tasks while watching TV). Twenty per cent of UK adults claim to do both at least weekly.

Which leads me to an interview I conducted with Channel 4’s Sanjeevan Bala, their head of planning analytics, audience technologies and insight. I asked Sanjeevan how this shift in viewing habits has for opened up TV for brands to direct market to viewers. In three minutes he covers the difference between interactive TV marketing and airtime advertising, how brands can make efficient media buys and how brands can merge their customer data with broadcasters’ audience data:

Sanjeevan will be an expert panelist at Rethink TV, the DMA’s TV summit on Friday 8 November. For more information visit the Rethink TV microsite.

By Tristan Garrick, the DMA’s Head of PR & Content