• by September 20, 2005

TV DINNERS: OUT; INTERNET LUNCHES: IN -- Here's something to chew on: American appetites for media are changing - literally. What we mean by that isn't the hunger people have for various forms of media, but how they consume media when they are consuming something else: food. We all know that eating was one of the original media multitasking cohorts. Long before people toggled between the TV, the PC and the iPod, there was the simultaneous use of media and meals. The archetype of course is the TV dinner, which defined an entire generation of media consumers - ones so rapt in their nighttime consumption of TV content that they chose to integrate their most important meal of the day into it. Okay, so nutritionists say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But then most nutritionists haven't seen what's set on our breakfast nook most mornings. Hint: Do Twinkies constitute a major food group?

Anyway, new research indicates that the TV dinner may have gone the way of, well, Swanson's TV Dinners - those indigestible wonders of our fast-food roots that could miraculously conjure a multi-course meal in the time it would take to whip up a multi-course meal from scratch. Yeah, those were the days when we preferred to have our ionizing radiation emitting from the back of our TV sets, not the front of our microwaves. And in case you think we are safer today than we were back then, just try sticking one of those foil-encased Swanson's dinners - Salisbury Steak was always our favorite -in a microwave. Make that two foil-wrapped food innovations that microwaves have been the foil of. Remember Jiffy Pop?

Clearly, both the eating and media habits of Americans have changed, but the myth of the TV dinner remains sacred. So it may come as a surprise to some that other media meals now rival the video supper, especially the online lunch. In fact, findings of the 2005 Middletown Studies, scheduled to be released next week by Ball State University, will show that online usage peaks around the lunch hour. That's no surprise, because unlike some media studies, BSU's research follows consumers throughout their day, even when they're not being consumers, but when they're being workers. Then again, a study released last week by Atlas, the research unit of aQuantive, suggests that workers are actually being consumers - online - during their lunch hours. The research shows that lunchtime has become prime-time for online conversion rates, meaning the rate at which an online ad exposure converts into a purchase decision.

Noon turns out to have the highest conversion rate of any hour in the day, according to the Atlas research. In fact, it is 35 percent higher than the Internet's average conversion rate. The 4 a.m. hour had the lowest rate, converting at less than half of the day's mean rate, while the morning, in general, showed the least activity.

Ball State, meanwhile, plans to take the concept of "meal-time" media a step farther, going beyond lunches and dinners. The researchers already are analyzing data correlating peak media usage times - as well as simultaneous media usage intervals - with all the meals people consume throughout the day, Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment at the Center for Media Design at Ball State, tells the Riff. Bloxham wouldn't tip his hand before next week's release of the Middletown data, but our minds are just racing over the daypart planning possibilities: breakfasts, brunches, snacks, cookies-and-milk, or our favorite meal: happy hour.