TORONTO – Canadians are not only world leaders when it comes to overall Internet usage in comparison to other countries, but we’re also among the biggest consumers of online video, according to recent statistics compiled by market analytics company comScore.
“Canada rocks,” said Bryan Segal, vice-president of comScore Canada, who used his opportunity to speak at the Digital Media Summit in Toronto to expand on comScore’s recent “2013 Canada Digital Future in Focus” report, released earlier this month. Canadians rank second globally in terms of both the amount of time spent online overall (41 hours per month) and the number of videos watched online per viewer (291 videos per month), according to comScore.
“When we look at Internet usage across the world, Canada continues to lead in terms of usage, in terms of the number of people online as a percentage of the population, in terms of engagement, and in terms of depth of data,” Segal said. “There’s a really big opportunity for content producers because Canadians love content.” Furthermore, the social web has become a “very viable source for advertising,” Segal said. According to comScore’s research, advertising on social media sites now accounts for about 27% of all display ad impressions viewed in Canada, Segal said.
In terms of how Internet users consume content, Segal said about 13% of all web traffic now comes from smartphones (8.1%) and tablets (4.7%), which is about double the amount of traffic that was generated from mobile devices a year ago. “It has become a challenge to measure someone’s footprint across all of these digital platforms,” Segal said. He added that although audiences have become fragmented, he does not believe media consumption on traditional platforms is decreasing.
“It’s about extending the audience,” Segal said. “TV usage is not decreasing, it’s extending as you’re looking at online video and so forth.”
According to comScore, more than half of tablet users say they watch video and TV on their devices. In addition, 43% of tablet users read magazines and books on their devices, Segal said. “Canadians are really, really, really into content, whether it’s magazine content, TV content or newspapers. They’re just using different platforms to view it,” Segal said.
The trend that comScore sees is that media consumption overall is increasing dramatically, with content being consumed every day across multiple devices by the same person. “If you think about the day in the life of a consumer – and the scary thing about that is when we think about how much media we consume – you can see PCs rule our day, smartphones rule our morning, and tablets rule our nighttime,” Segal said. “There’s a convergence of all of these different platforms that people are interacting with, not only in silos, but concurrently.”
The challenge then becomes how to tap into the advertising opportunity presented by these interactive platforms, Segal said. “The more you can interact with the advertising and the content, the more you can work the frequencies between the multiple media, the more your message can be heard. And it can become very cool in terms of the interactivity that can be applied from there,” Segal said.
To measure audience engagement in the digital world, online advertising metrics need to move to a “viewable impressions” approach to measurement instead of the standard “click-through rate” method used currently, Segal said.
He explained that advertising on other media, such as TV, uses an “opportunity to see” (OTS) standard for measuring audience reach. “Now that digital media is not this little kid who lives in the basement, it’s now big corporations and big advertising budgets, CMOs (chief marketing officers) and people in marketing want the same metrics that they have for traditional media,” Segal said.
“If we want to show that digital media is a big deal, then we need to be able to go to buyers and planners who don’t just plan digital and say, ‘Here’s a simple measure that you guys can use for your whole lives and here’s how it can adapt to digital,’” he said.
Segal concluded by noting this will require a change in vocabulary, so the language of end-to-end advertising metrics is understood by all media buyers, regardless of whether they’re advertising on digital or traditional media platforms.
