• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, February 12, 2015

The oft-cited, albeit shallow, metric du jour has been that we now spend more time on mobile devices and in-app than with TV. That metric doesn’t account for the kind of attention each screen demands, of course, nor how receptive viewers are to what kinds of advertising on each display. Mobile firms, like the Web tech and content companies before them, love carting out such numbers to make the point that media spend for an emerging platform is somehow woefully trailing usage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, it turns out that the contest between screens is more than a mathematical one over mind share. The two screens are competing for attention in a pretty clear way. According to a Localytics study (responsible for all the stats quoted below), TV prime time overlaps with app prime time.

It may feel as if we are spreading mobile usage over all those scores of quick look-ups throughout the day. And during the workday, mobile usage is relatively level. But starting in late afternoon, it rises noticeably, to peak at 8 p.m. and descend to about the levels of daytime use at 11 p.m.

The patterns are unsurprisingly different for genres. News, travel and weather apps are morning look-ups, peaking at 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. Business, finance and music apps are used heavily but steadily throughout the day and evening. And interestingly, the business and finance category is also just as strong at all hours, suggesting that people are using their phones to stay connected to work at all hours.

Entertainment content appears to be among the most consistent, high-performing categories. While other app categories see a sharp decline in use in the 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. day  part, entertainment never sleeps. Social networking, on the other hand, does sleep, peaking between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.

The degree to which we are now are distracted by a personal, alternative screen while the TV is on, is not fully understood. We know there are spikes in mobile usage during TV ad pods. Advertisers can take this as a sign of the diminished impact of their TV buys or as an opportunity to tie the two screens together with second-screen follow-through.

Some of that may be wishful thinking, though. I think most of us know intuitively that TV viewing in the age of mobile is often relegated to peripheral attention. I often come to the end of a TV show I thought I was "watching," only to realize I can't recall what was going on because I was poking around my smartphone or tablet. This is a true fragmentation of attention that has to have consequences for TV advertising.  

Of course heightened activity in an app category may optimize your reach, but that doesn’t mean you are hitting that target at the right time for them. I have to wonder if those weather app users at 8 a.m. are as responsive to an ad intervention when they get to work as more lean-back users at night, just checking the next day’s forecast at leisure.

And to revisit an argument I have made several times before, the metrics suggest that users need to time-shift their advertising.  Mobile advertising needs a save-for-later function baked into the operating system or the ad tech. Make the advertising as convenient as the content.