••• television research
Wide drop in TV viewership
According to a study by cultural insights agency ThinkNow, Burbank, Calif., live TV viewing has dropped from 68 percent to 48 percent, a 20-point decline across all audiences. The survey includes a representative sample of U.S. Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians and non-Hispanic whites regarding media consumption and gaming habits.
Live network TV is losing ground as the most-often choice for watching programming across all segments, dropping from 45 percent in 2017 to 31 percent in 2018. African-Americans had the largest percentage point decline in live TV viewing, a 22-point decline from 75 percent in 2017 to 53 percent in 2018. Seventy-one percent of Hispanics watch TV programming through Netflix, compared to 59 percent of non-Hispanic whites, 63 percent of African-Americans and 55 percent of Asians. Additionally, 35 percent of Hispanics say they watch TV programming most often using Netflix.
Almost half (47 percent) of all consumers perceive streaming as the future of television and a reason why they prefer watching shows through streaming services. The study also shows that Baby Boomers have experienced a 21-point decline in live TV viewing habits compared to 2017.
••• data analysis
Marketers crave data
A report by Research Now SSI and Econsultancy shows that the need for high-quality internal and external data is top-of-mind for marketers. The report explores perceptions and use of integrated data by companies, agencies, technology vendors and independent marketing consultants and is based on an online survey of marketers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.
The findings show that all respondents consider the quality of internal data to be important to their businesses, while 93 percent of client-side respondents see high-quality customer data as “critical to business success.” Quality of data is the biggest concern for both client-side (63 percent) and agency respondents (61 percent), significantly ahead of the second-biggest concern: expense of data.
Sixty-three percent of respondents strongly agreed that time spent on improving data quality is always time well spent. Confidence in third-party data differs between client-side and agency respondents, where 41 percent of agencies are “extremely confident” in the quality of the data their clients are using, compared to 17 percent of respondents from companies themselves.