We’re Actively Media Multi-Tasking, But Are We Good At It?

It’s a familiar scene. I’m sitting on my couch, smartphone in hand, laptop by my side, a 50 inch Samsung flatscreen TV catching me up on a backlog of DVR recordings. An email pops up on my phone, and I turn to the laptop to respond – it’s faster to type that way. Then while I’m there, I check Facebook. Oh look, an interesting article. I read it. It links me to a video. Instinctively, I grab the remote control and pause the DVR so I can hear the video on my laptop. Which inevitably leads me to another video, and another. And suddenly an hour has flown by, and I’ve only watched 10 minutes of that show on my DVR, and I don’t remember even a minute of it. Rewind, restart, replay.

Media-multitasking has been a topic of discussion among media professionals for years. TV in particular has long been a companion tool – one that co-exists not only with other media, but with activities ranging from eating to cleaning to parenting. I broach the subject of media-multitasking not because it's new, but because it's increasingly relevant for programmers and marketers alike. My own in-home ethnography is not universally projectable, but it does illustrate the very human limitation of being able to digest only so much information at once.

Earlier this month, The Hollywood Reporter referenced a recent Harris Interactive research study in which 63 percent of adults claimed that they look at online content while watching TV.  (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/digitas-research-tv-viewers-online-celebrities-upfrontsl-308202).  The article posited that, “Overall, the nation seems increasingly comfortable with doing several things at once.

In fact, the reality is that while we may be comfortable with media-multitasking, academic research suggests that we might not actually be good at it.

A 2011 study conducted by researchers at Boston College found that when consumers watch TV in front of their computer, they change focus from one device to the other roughly every 14 seconds.  That’s approximately 240 fixation changes every hour. It seems that when given simultaneous media choices, we may generally lack the ability to focus on just one for any extended period of time: the study reported that the average visual gaze lasted 5.3 seconds on the computer and just 1.8 seconds on the TV. Only 7.5% of all computer gazes and 2.9% of all glances at the TV lasted longer than a minute.

The results might bear particular concern to TV programmers, who rely on viewers to remain loyal and engaged week after week (or day after day, in the case of syndicated series and news): 68% of participants’ time was focused on the computer, with just 31% of the time focused on the TV.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the study is that participants believed they were far more attentive than they actually were. On average, they estimated that they changed their visual fixation about 15 times in half an hour. In reality, that number was closer to 120.  We think our attention spans can last a couple minutes, but when we start media-multitasking, we’re far more inclined to stay focused for only a few seconds. (Read the whitepaper here: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/cyber.2010.0350)

So while it’s true that media-multitasking is escalating and can indeed be used to drive cross-platform engagement, it’s also true that this escalating behavior creates distraction. Even if the ratings indicate that audiences are still with you, their attention and loyalty might very well be gravitating somewhere else. Consumers might be comfortable with that, but programmers and advertisers shouldn’t be.