• by Peter Lauria , January 29, 2007

Modern multitaskers are really on the ball when it comes to the juggling act

A self-described Mac geek, Michael Corbett is keen on Apple's new iPhone. As news broke last month about the new gadget, the 24-year-old publishing assistant kept an eye on a Web site that featured live news updates from bloggers attending the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. And, oh yeah, while it was all going on, Corbett listened to a live stream of "The Howard Stern Show" on Sirius Satellite Radio's Web site.

If this sounds at all familiar, it should - it's a portrait of the new media consumer - not all that different from the old media consumer, just staggeringly more efficient.

Then again, given that there are still only 24 hours in a day, efficiency is paramount. For example, the most recent Communications Industry Forecast from Veronis Suhler Stevenson estimates that this year, Americans will spend 9.5 hours in a 24-hour day with media, the seventh increase in as many years and by far, the most time spent on any daily activity.

Small wonder then that a Ball State University study on "concurrent media exposure," or exposure to content from multiple media simultaneously available through shared or shifting attention, found that almost one-third or more of the time spent with any one medium was time also spent with another medium.

What's stunning, however, is that most of the study's respondents, who ranged in age from 18 to 65, have been so exposed to media and are so adept at processing it that they didn't even realize how frequently they engage in concurrent media use.

"Only 61 percent of [respondents] recorded one or more episodes of concurrent media exposure, while 100 percent of participants in the observational study were found to engage in [it]," according to the study.

The increase in media multitasking is partly owed to the simple fact that more media are available to us than ever before and a range of new devices, especially portable ones, have cropped up that can easily switch from one form of media to another (i.e., a cell phone that plays music and can access the Internet).

The innovation isn't owed to some cultural imperative, but rather to a far less noble goal: money. According to Mitch Oscar, executive vice president of Carat Digital, the increase in media consumption is directly correlated to the rapid maturation of businesses to meet Wall Street's earnings demands.

"Companies have to expand and grow to meet the Street's expectations," Oscar says. "For instance, telecom companies went from offering local service to also offering long-distance and then wireless, and the escalating price war among wireless carriers is now leading to an ever-larger suite of media applications." All of which have, in turn, led to increased media consumption.

The list of ways to consume media now that weren't available just a few decades ago is as long as it is varied and includes such advances as VOD, satellite radio, PDAs, MP3 players, and handheld video game devices.

And while it isn't hard to imagine commonly multitasked media activities such as a college student checking her e-mail in between conducting research for a paper while ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" plays in the background, it is not at all unusual nowadays for young males to stack two TVs - one for TV-watching and the other for video games - "so they can use both simultaneously," according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study on media multitasking among American youth.

That level of sophistication suggests an expectation about the availability of media and a mastery for absorbing it among today's consumers that has shifted the entire balance of power in industries ranging from entertainment to advertising in their favor.

Or, according to Michael Corbett, "It's up to consumers to decide what they want to have quality time with. There are so many choices that you can pick what you want to give your attention to. I usually jump from one thing to another until something catches my eye, and then I hone in on it."

The wide availability of media and the unbridled control over it has led "consumers to the expectation that anything is gettable," says Jason Hirschhorn, president of Sling Media's Entertainment Group and the former chief digital officer at MTV.

And if a particular piece of media isn't on hand immediately, technology has made available the necessary tools for consumers to create it themselves.

To be sure, it's antiquated to think of present and future generations consuming media at all in the sense of having music, TV shows, and news programmed and pushed to them. Now, nearly all kids know how to take a picture with a cell phone, upload a video clip to the Web, and personalize their home pages to get only the content they want. Indeed, kids today are just as likely to create their own media ecosystem and aggregate their own audience around it as they are to participate in or contribute to someone else's.

"People are going to à la carte a lot of shit," is how Hirschhorn puts it.

It seems as though they already are - since a majority of American teens are doing just that on social networking Web sites like MySpace or Facebook.

Credit for the increase in media consumption and control is largely owed to the ability to digitally codify information, according to Paul Levinson, chairman of the media and entertainment department at Fordham University, who cites the transformation of the computer as a gateway to other media activities as the supreme example.

The computer's ability to easily shift from e-mail to a Web site to a phone call, combined with the inherent breaks in work flow, is well-suited to concurrent exposure. Other advances, such as the rise of broadband video, mobile devices, and wireless technologies, have elevated electronic/digital media to constant-companion status among people younger than 35.

A Ball State Study found that "the 18-24 age group spends more minutes per day than any other group on instant messaging, mobile phones, music, video use, and game consoles."

Conversely, "print media are predictably absent from the top concurrent media exposure ranks for the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups," according to the study. In just a few decades, daily computer use has risen to trail only television, averaging 166 minutes a day to TV's 266 minutes a day.

Surprisingly, the computer's encouragement of multitasking is equal to the television's discouragement of it, suggesting that the former promotes active, albeit partial, engagement with multiple forms of content while the latter fosters a "vegged-out" state of mind.

Only about 17 percent of time spent watching TV is shared with another medium, according to the Kaiser study's findings, compared with an average of more than 65 percent for computer-based activities.

However, as home computer usage rises and its video distribution capabilities continue to improve, it's not unreasonable to expect the singular attention paid to television to erode, giving way to increasing rates of concurrent media consumption. After all, according to Leo Kivijarv, vice president of research at PQ Media, time spent with media is reaching critical mass.

"There aren't enough hours in a day to increase time spent with media," so the only way to increase exposure is to incorporate media into our lives more efficiently, says Kivijarv, and by that, he means more concurrent use.

Even the Kaiser Family Foundation, noted television-industry loyalists, went so far as to say that, "Once television content becomes more prevalent on the computer, it is likely that young people will communicate via IM during the natural breaks in television dialogue."

It's thinking like this that prompted AOL to redesign its home page to encourage multitasking by dividing it into quadrants that allow consumers to manage four different tasks simultaneously on one screen. "That's a perfect example of media adapting to the consumer and revising the way it puts out content," Kivijarv notes.

However, a change in the mode of consumption precipitates a change in the nature of consumption; people are spending more time with media but they are using it in shorter, more frenetic bursts.

A large body of scientific research suggests that the human brain is innately wired for multitasking but there is a limit to the amount of information that can be processed at once. For example, a 2005 study found that audiences had difficulty processing the tickers, headlines, and main news story on CNN when the information contained in each was unrelated.

"Despite attempts to impart a variety of information on the same screen, and using both audio and visual channels, audiences can only successfully process information from different channels when it is semantically consistent," the researchers concluded.

The way in which the brain functions dovetails perfectly with the type of concurrent media usage that the computer fosters, and represents why younger generations are more adept at media multitasking than older generations. On the computer, people aren't absorbing information simultaneously so much as they are switching between different centers of activity to process different kinds of information.

The sheer amount of media consumed and the number of devices it is spread across represents a double-edged sword for marketers - while it is easier than ever to reach a target audience, it's getting harder and harder to find them.

That's one reason why Alan Wurtzel, president for research at NBC, believes that the best way to reach consumers today is not by beating them over the head with a brand message but by offering navigational assistance that helps them easily access and use what they're seeking. Wurtzel points to an NBC in-house study of baby boomers and GenX and GenY that found 75 percent of respondents across age groups agreeing that they are overwhelmed by the amount of media available to them.

There's a reason why the three biggest names in new media are Google, YouTube, and iTunes: Each share the characteristic of easy navigation. "People get frustrated when they can't find what they want quickly and easily," Wurtzel says. Brand equity and value can be built based upon solid navigation.

Wurtzel's view is also supported by research conducted by Inter-public's recently disbanded Consumer Experience Practice unit, which found that "by sponsoring a new experience that extends engagement rather than disrupts it, brands can strengthen their contextual involvement and connection with the consumer."

Or, to put it another way, if Corbett and his peers are going to jump from screen to screen to screen, it's probably more effective for brands to help them get where they want to go, rather than try to sell them something when they get there.