• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 7, 2011

Remember dayparts? You know the quaint old industry jargon used to describe the times of days that people spent with media, usually TV (it's where the term prime-time, daytime, late night comes from). Well, media planners have a new buzz term coming out of the mobile media industry, and it's called "time-parting." Or at least that's what the folks on the OMMA Mobile Agency Workshop panel used to describe it. And if you listen to them, it's got humongous implications for the way people plan and buy media.

Take search as an example. Yahoo Mobile Sales Strategy chief Paul Cushman said that in the past, many search users simply turned their computer-based search off on the weekend. "You don't do that with mobile," he said.

Cushman noted that a new white paper describing some of these time-parting behaviors will be posted shortly at advertising.yahoo.com, but he shared some other interesting findings, including the fact that mobile usage is expanding the time of day media planners need to account for – almost doubling it.

"Your digital day has gotten a lot longer and harder to plan for," he said, adding that "a couple of years ago it was real easy," and that a planner could simply utilize a business morning "roadblock" to ensure "first impression" reach among a critical mass of their online user targets.

"The same first impression of the day has shifted two hours earlier to when they are standing in their kitchen with a couple of coffee," he said, adding that on the other end of the spectrum, the last digital impression of the day has moved to 11 p.m., when users might be co-browsing on an iPad or smartphone.

"That's added a lot of hours to the day. It's doubled," he said.