America’s Largest Industry

When I tell people that advertising is the single largest industry in America (and possibly one of our largest exports) I often get some funny looks. Let me show you a couple of data points that help illustrate this:

• 116 million households have at least 1 TV
• 55% of those household have more than 3
• There are more 310.3 million people in the US, with 55% of the home owning more than 3 televisions  – WE NOW HAVE MORE TV’S IN THE US THAN WE DO PEOPLE
• 54% of TV’s are HD capable
• Americans spend 35 hours 34 minutes watching TV
• American watch more cable TV than broadcast TV
• 78% of American’s go online everyday
• 31% of American read the newspaper on a given day, the lowest in a decade
• 10% of American’s own an e-reader
• There are 286 million wireless/cell phone subscribers in the US.
• 89% of households have a cell phone
• 25% of Home only have a cell phone
• Teens send about 50 texts daily : Adults send about 10 texts daily
• Smart phones account for 25% of the phones in use
• 40% of the US population maintains a social media profile

The web has trained advertisers to hold media accountable for the eyes they deliver. The fundamental problem is that most solutions watch the appliance not the ‘eyes’. As an example, a set top box only know what my TV set did – it can not tell me who was in the room. It most certainly can not tell me the demographics of each person.

If media is going to tell advertisers exactly who they deliver across all of their platforms then we need to change the way we track. It is no longer satisfactory to track and report a single platform because nobody advertises on just TV, or just Radio.

At RawData, we have done it. We can track how a single consumer interacts with multiple platforms and then report exact demographics and consumption.

RawData – This Week in StartUps

The guys at Venture Blue hosted Utah at This Week in Startups and RawData was selected from a field of extremely capable companies to present.

We had some technical difficulties that made the back and forth difficult so I wanted answer one of the key comment that was made, ‘If this works then it is a 10.’

Well I am excited to announce, it works! We just wrapped up alpha testing with panelist in two markets(Seattle and Salt Lake City). Here are some of the results that we have loaded into our dashboard:

Absolutely amazing we can view the cross platform consumption habits of panelist – if you look at the green and red lines those tell us the viewers for this show came from and went.

We even see the minute by minute level consumption. Answering questions like, where did my viewers come from and where did they go? How much time did they spend on all my properties? Is my TV campaign supporting my website? Did my agency buy the best media to reach my audience?

Let us know your thoughts, we would love to hear your feedback.

Evolve or Dissolve

“The newsroom of the future really is multi-platform. And this is the genesis of that,” Psarras explains. “This is a creation of an opportunity for people to learn and explore in a different medium, while at the same time maintaining an ability to cover the day’s news.”

Con Psarras, VP of KSL 5 News

We at RawData could not agree more with the folks at KSL. Media consumption is and has been cross-platform. We may watch the news on our phones, on TV, or on the web. With TiVo’s we can also choose when we want to consume our television. Technology has enabled consumers to decide what, when, and how they are going to consume.

It is time that the analytics and tracking of consumers kept pace with how the population consumes. Simply put, it is time for a cross-platform consumer media tracking.

Do Americans Care About Soccer?

I heard a theory recently that intrigued me.  Simply stated, the theory was this: Americans care about soccer more than we think.  Proponents of this theory claim that TV ratings are severely underestimating the number of people watching soccer games in the United States.  Specifically, they point to two shortcomings in the way that media consumption is currently being measured.

The first problem relates to issue of public viewing.  As it turns out, lots of Americans congregate at sports bars and at private parties to watch soccer games.  Traditional media measurement techniques have no way of accounting for such out-of-the-home viewing.  In other words, soccer’s biggest fans – those who love the sport enough to attend parties dedicated to it – are going almost entirely uncounted. It is widely accepted that ratings “would metastasize at an even greater rate if ESPN or Univision were credited for taproom and taqueria audiences. As neither network has made guarantees against Arbitron’s unaccredited ARB-TV [out-of-the-home measurement] service, millions of fans will go uncounted.”(1)

The second problem is internet viewing.  World Cup games are now broadcast via the internet and thousands of people are watching them on their computers and on their mobile handsets.  Despite this fundamental shift in the way people are watching soccer, “neither ESPN nor its mobile partners could provide total audience numbers for live mobile streaming.”(2)

Unfortunately, these two shortcomings leave us with our original question.  Could the theory be true?  Could Americans actually care about soccer more than we think?  Unfortunately, the current media measurement techniques provide no way of definitively answering that question.  Until we begin accurately measuring out-of-the-home and internet viewing, we simply cannot estimate the number of people actually viewing a given television event.