Families still gather in the living room. It’s just a more complicated place
There was a time when the living room was the hub of family life. Though it has always been a very private, personal space where mom, dad and the kids gathered to spend quality time together after dinner, it was also a place for advertisers to reach mom, dad and the kids through the TV they watched, radio they listened to and newspapers they read.
It’s easy to dismiss this ideal as something from the Leave It To Beaver era, but even into the 1990s and 2000s, advertisers knew they could reach consumers through mass media enjoyed from the family couch.
Given the tech upheaval of the past decade, marketers have been left wondering just what the living room means to families now. Advertisers can’t be blamed for thinking of their customers as avatars rather than physical people. Today “where?” refers to the website someone’s visiting as often as what store they shop at, or what postal code they live in. And media fragmentation means even when people are in the same place, they aren’t always doing the same thing. The relevance of the old-fashioned living room seems in doubt.
Marketing, in partnership with Microsoft Advertising and Rogers Connect Market Research, conducted a survey of Canadians with kids. The findings suggest there’s a fair number of those 1950s values still alive in our households. While much has changed, family time is still quite sacred, and the living room is its shrine. It’s just a more complicated place.
Does the living room still matter?
Entertainment may be portable, but the living room is still an after-dinner hub for families. Perhaps the survey’s most surprising finding was that parents in homes with lots of gadgets are more likely to want to spend time in the same room as their family members. Among all respondents, 89% said they like doing things in the same room as other family members, even if they’re not talking with them. That increases to 94% among those families who say they have a high number of gadgets. No matter what activities are taking place, the living room is more often where it happens.
• Average time spent in the living room daily: 4.3 hours
• Families spent almost twice as much time in the living room as any other room in the house
• Households with an annual income of more than $80K report spending less time together than other income-level households
The Power Of 11
Forget the broad “under 18” demographic category. While it’s often useful to lump “kids” together when comparing them to groups with higher education and income levels, doing so here would overlook an interesting power shift that takes place as kids evolve into tweens and teens. When a family’s eldest child reaches 11, the statistics concerning media use begin to change drastically. It seems to be a useful analytical tipping point to figure out how likely a household is to bring more technology into the living room and who’s steering those purchasing decisions.
Families with children in this age range also consider themselves more tech-savvy and, unsurprisingly, report having more technology in the living room.
The Fate Of TV
Yes, there are more media options in the home for both kids and adults, but respondents identified the TV as the centre of their media experience in the home. It’s turned on more often than any other device, so while websites, smartphones and tablets may be competing for attention, the largest screen in the house remains the most constant media influence. Prime time, it seems, is still the right time for broad outreach.
• Respondents listed “watching television shows” as their top living room activity (87%)
• Most popular video content services: live TV (77%), rented DVD (55%) and streamed online video (44%)
• Top three items consumers have in their living room: DVD players (73%), HD televisions (59%) and laptops (53%)
• Top item that respondents plan to purchase next year: HD television
Mom and Dad
Much of the data reinforces a few old stereotypes about who holds the remote and who’s more interested in gadgets: Dad, of course.
Men responded that their families were more likely to view content on smartphones (14% vs. 10% of women) and tablets (12% vs. 7% of women).
Moreover, men are more likely to view content from a computer (47% vs. 40%), while women were more likely to rent the relatively traditional DVD movie (58% vs. 52%).
The survey also showed dads drive most of the purchasing when it comes to technology in the living room, though as kids creep above that 11-year-old mark, they play a much larger role in consulting on new devices and what technology to buy.
Tech Creep
We didn’t need a survey to tell us just how cluttered living rooms have become with tech (just look how many charge cords are lying near your power outlets). But what technology? Laptops are the main “second screen” in the living room—half of all respondents said they use one simultaneously with their TV. But close on its heels is the mobile phone (40%). The top five also include game consoles (25%), a desktop computer (24%) and tablet (12%). While tablets are one of the least likely devices to be owned (18%), those who have one seem to use them constantly: 93% of tablet owners reported using it simultaneously with the TV, 66% with a laptop, 57% with a mobile phone, 28% with a game console and 28% with a desktop computer. The tablet is also the clear must-have item on people’s shopping lists.
For more industry analysis and commentary on media technology trends, subscribe to Marketing.
