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.

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