My day in media (Pseudoscience)

Synopsis

We know that the way we consume media has fundamentally changed during the last few years. I’d consider myself to be fairly active in keeping in touch with what’s going on in the papers, radio, online and TV, but I do it as second nature. I hadn’t really stopped to think before about the key areas I sourced my information from – so I decided to investigate.

Methodology

During the course of 24 hours I kept a note of each time I came into contact with various information outlets from friends, to twitter, to papers to the radio.

I then plotted the data into a word cloud to reveal frequency.

Results

Drawbacks

Of course this doesn’t really show how much information is taken from each source – it’s more frequency of exposure, but it still got me thinking.

Discussion

I expected Twitter to feature large on my day to day media map, I dip in and out of it all day long, and have deliberately connected to some really interesting news sources. But there are several features of my daily media consumption which really did surprise me.

Advertising – I am acutely aware of how much we are bombarded by advertising messages and, personally, I love advertising (when it’s done right), but it is everywhere – from the billboard outside the tube, to the wrap around on my metro, the pop ups on my favourite sites and the interruptions to my favourite programmes. When I began to map it out – the constant stream of advertising messages began to exhaust me.

I also believed that the way online media via news sites is consumed (picking and choosing the stories we read) meant that if I was to only read the news online I wouldn’t have such a broad knowledge. What I like about print is that you flick through and stumble across stories that you might not have chosen to read online.

But although I’m selective when in the news site itself – general Internet browsing – blogs and social media – account for a far greater amount of time than those news sites I do visit. I think this counteracts the ‘stumbleability’ factor I thought I’d miss from print.

Conclusion

Passive media uptake is almost as prominent as active – we’re subjected to marketing messages from the moment we wake up to when we go to bed – there’s just no escaping it. Ergo (and this couldn’t be pseudoscience without Latin) marketeers need to understand the media map of their customers in order to best tap into those touchpoints which best influence them.