• by January 29, 2003

Put simply, “early adopters” give us a glimpse of what we all may be doing in a few years. Today the tech-savvy are seen as leaders in fashion and style — quite a change from the days of lab coats and pocket protectors. Advanced cell phones are marketed as hip fashion accessories, and what could be cooler than cruising the Web on your BlackBerry while riding the train home from work? “Early adopters” are the brave souls who experiment with new devices when they are still too expensive or intimidating for average folk. With PDAs and PVRs blurring the lines between media, advertising, and technology, the advertising agency community is giving its due to technology and the leading-edge consumers who make gadgets a priority. The implications of TiVo have become a subject of almost endless analysis — and anxiety — and some agencies have even created specialized units to stay ahead of the innovation curve. “The changes that have happened because of technology have been so quick and so vast, I can’t imagine what the next five years will bring,” says Susan Nathan, senior vice president and director of media knowledge at Universal McCann. “Early adopters are the first wave — sometimes the do-or-die in terms of whether a certain technology survives.”

What does it take to be an early adopter? “You know them when you see them,” says Nathan. Early adopters are into “more” — they consume more media than average people, and they are likely to take on a range of new technologies, instead of confining their experiments to telephones or computers or entertainment gadgets. Generally speaking, it’s a good bet that people with the fanciest PDAs also have the latest cell phones and the fastest Web connections, and that they have read, heard, and seen more media on any given day.

Research from Knowledge Networks/SRI shows that three key factors correlate with early adopter status: the presence of children in the household, higher income, and higher education. Families with kids are 50% more likely to own a DVD player and 40% more likely to have a high-speed Web connection (broadband). And though we may think of EAs as being young, it’s not until consumers enter their prime earning years — reflected by income level and, usually, marriage and children — that they become serious technology accumulators. Levels of home broadband and wireless Internet access are more than twice as high for households earning $50,000 or more.

If we use home broadband access as a proxy for early adopter status, we also see that these people are above-average users of traditional and new media alike — that they are not using less radio or television just because they have a faster Web connection. In fact, early adopters learn about new technologies, twice as much through television (65%), as through the Internet (30%), magazines (41%) and newspapers (33%) which are also sources of information about cutting-edge devices and services.

Within the EA group, there are also differences by gender and age. Women are more likely to depend on TV, word of mouth, and newspapers for their technology news, while men turn to magazines and the Internet. Younger respondents are more likely to rely on the Internet than those 50 or older; and older respondents learn more from print. The moral is: Don’t imagine that you can reach and influence early adopters via advanced technology and new media alone. A safer route would be to increase your Internet presence while maintaining your GRPs in TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers.

So if television is still the smartest way to influence early adopters, what are the best places to reach them on TV? A new KN/SRI report, covering 31 top networks and 30 key technologies, found the highest overall levels of technology ownership are in homes that regularly view HBO and Showtime — premium, non-ad-supported networks. Many of the Top 10 are networks that appeal to children or young adults, such as MTV, Disney, Nickelodeon, and Animal Planet. By contrast, homes that regularly view broadcast networks tend to have lower levels of technology, with the exception of UPN and The WB.

In fact, you could say that the truest “early adopters” are kids. They may not be able to afford the fanciest cell phones, and they may think PDAs are too much bother, but they are absorbing new technologies and their capabilities in a way that will shape them as adults. And as “technology consultants,” they have often-underestimated influence on what their parents are buying or planning to buy.

So which media technologies mean the most to kids, the “earliest” adopters? If they were forced to choose only one, more kids (ages 8 to 17) told KN/SRI they would pick the Internet, with boys putting the Web first more often than girls (38% vs. 28%). Boys were also twice as likely to choose television (34% vs. 17%), and girls were almost three times as likely to pick the telephone (31% vs. 12%).

Although their actual use of traditional media remains strong — TV and radio still far outpace the Internet in time spent among children — kids know that the Internet can bring them video, audio, and interactivity in one place. It is a level of control and sophistication that will likely serve as the starting point of their expectations about technology.

Meanwhile, the technological possibilities for the future seem endless, as do the advertising opportunities they may present. “They’re now marketing PDAs to busy moms as a way to keep track of their kids’ soccer practices,” observes Nathan. “And I’ve also heard that as you walk by a store, a coupon or announcement from that store can be beamed to your PDA.”

And as that future approaches, advertisers and agencies will turn to early adopters to help the media community separate hype from reality, and find ways of transforming futuristic technologies into present-day profits.

David C. Tice is vice president, client service, at Knowledge Networks/SRI. He heads The Home Technology Monitor, KN/SRI’s innovative service tracking ownership of media technologies and how consumers interact with them.