Are Couch Potatoes endangered?

The president of a major French television station - Patrick Le Lay - a few years ago, he explained that his job as a station manager was "to occupy the available brain time. It was a blessed time for the men of advertising and television "couch potatoes", those viewers passively receiving all the messages. Times are changing...

Today with the emergence of smartphones, tablets, ... we see the second screen generation appearing. Television is no longer watched passively and more specifically, advertising slots, as viewers zap from their TV screen to their device screen.

Looking for additional information, sharing channels, modes of interactivities, simply drifting.

A series of very interesting studies published in recent weeks in the USA give some figures on this emerging phenomenon.

A few figures

- More than 80 % of the televiewers use their mobile device while watching TV (88 % tablets, 86 % smartphones).

- 58 % of them do something other than watch the ads: 61 % send emails, 47 % visit a social network related to the program (and for 77, 45 % visit a social network related to the ad they are watching, 37 % actively seek information about what they are watching, 27 % seek information about the products the ad is about, and 22 % collect promotional offers on the products that are the subject of the ads.

What an activity! These simple figures describe a trend in which the consumer is reversing the flow of information: he is no longer satisfied with what he receives. They are looking for more, they want more.

This phenomenon affects all categories of the population and of course particularly young people: 73 % of 18/24 year olds are involved in another activity on their mobile during TV commercials.

Interactivity with the second screen

These practices point to a whole field of innovations to resolve the question of the interactivity of the television screen with mobile "second screens". There is no doubt that in this challenge, the technologies for visual recognition of television programme streams will be closely observed.

Illustration credit © The zombies of DoX

{Jacuzzi on}