How much do people use their mobile phones?

On average, Americans spend 2.7 hours per day socializing on their mobile device.

That’s over twice the amount of time they spend eating, and over 1/3 of the time they spend sleeping each day.

Detail from an infographic produced by Microsoft’s Tag blog.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

A long-time advertising adage runs something like this: buy time on television and fifty percent of your budget is wasted. Which fifty? Who knows. But fifty percent it will be.

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IAB coverage was made possible through the kind support of CPX Interactive.

The target is simply too broad. Selling men’s deodorant? Your ad spend just hit a considerable amount of women and adolescents. Selling womanly products? A bunch of men just switched channels.

This much is known. Television may be our greatest mass medium but it fails the advertiser specifically because it’s such a mass medium. Yes there are numbers in that buy. But do those numbers contain the specific demographic we hope to reach? Cross our fingers that perhaps so.

But next time you’re in a meeting room see how well the fingers crossed strategy goes down. When the dust settles and the abuse subsides, give us a call and we’ll start thinking strategy, round two.

Television people know this. No matter how segmented our thousand digital channels may be, they’re never quite segmented enough for the ad buyer. There are simply too many unknown people channel surfing on the other side of the tube.

Avner Ronen knows this too. The founder and CEO of Boxee, creators of the open source, “Internet TV” media center, might seem an unlikely savior for the small screen industry and what ails it but savior they might be.

“One of the worst things that happened to advertising on TV is DVR,” he says in the video above, referring to the increasing American propensity to time shift television viewing by recording shows.

As Nielsen reported last year:

“Must See TV” doesn’t mean that people are gathering around their TV anymore during primetime on a Thursday night. Appointment viewing is now when the viewer wants to watch it thanks to DVRs. As of March 2009, 30.6 percent of households in Nielsen’s National People Meter Panel have a DVR, up significantly from just 12.3 percent in January 2007.
A key factor to this expansion is the integration of DVRs into cable and DBS set top boxes: 55 percent of DVR homes had it as part of their cable box and 40 percent had a DVR within their DBS box. Just 5 percent had a standalone DVR. And as households recognize the convenience DVR offers, a growing number are becoming multi-DVR households. 25 percent of homes had two, while 5 percent had three or more.

Take a step back and you realize that not only will an advertiser pay for an audience that might not care for its wares, but those that record programs might skip over the commercials entirely.

Again, we know this but Ronen thinks Internet TV could change it. DVR, he believes, could become obsolete once programming enters the cloud. The point here is why would people record if the programming is always there. Then, if and when delivered through a Boxee type application through the Internet, advertisers can get the measurement details they crave.

“You get the benefits of targeting and measurement and accountability that you have on the Internet and that should be great news for the industry,” Ronen believes.

Content consumer stand to benefit too. If traditional television is a one to many broadcast medium with recipients passive consumers of advertisements, Internet TV turns us into active participants in that process.

Hulu’s been experimenting with this model, asking viewers to decide what type of advertising they’d like to see before watching clips and shows. This will increasingly become the norm and with active audience participation and ownership, the idea is there will be greater recall rates and engagement with actual brand advertising.

Boxee’s currently innovating. They plan on releasing a payment platform in the second quarter of this year. Good news for the networks and other publishers that are looking for monetization strategies.

“When people value content they will pay for it,” says Ronen.

For Boxee skeptics, Internet engagement, measurement and discernible metrics are certainly a better strategy than fingers crossed on a lost fifty percent.

About Aardvark and the Synaptic Web

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

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