1.10 Social Media Marketing in a 24/7 Marketplace

Traditional media sure tried hard to capture every available minute of our lives. There were (and still are) shelves of magazines for every imaginable hobby, different newspapers for all political stripes, and endless cable TV programs from the bizarre to the baffling. Nielsen Media Research began tracking the amount of television viewed by American households in 1949, and at 4.5 hours per day, the high total surprised many researchers. (Many assumed that television would capture fewer hours in the American household than radio since radio was a more “flexible” medium that people could consume while doing other things.) As it turned out, most Americans didn’t want to “do” other things; they just wanted to watch more TV. And as television networks grew, and more radio programs migrated to television, that total number of TV hours per day continued to grow well into the 21st century. In 2009, television viewership peaked, with the average American household watching 8 hours and 55 minutes of TV per day—that’s more time than most people sleep every day.1

One would assume that since the 1940s, with the growth of all things social, services like Facebook, mobile phones, YouTube, and Netflix would have dramatically changed those numbers. And they have. But not universally. What we are seeing is a massive generational shift in media habits and consumption. Older Americans are largely watching the same amount of traditional (cable) television as they have in the past, with younger Americans abandoning traditional TV for the social platforms and streaming video content now available.

Don’t for a moment think that the 12 to 34-year-old crowd that has dramatically cut back on their traditional television viewing has put that free time to work by deciding to learn a foreign language or French cooking. Nope. They are filling those hours with a mix of digital, online, social, and streaming content. And the totals are eye-watering. In 2019, estimates put total viewing and screen time at over 10 hours a day. Throw a global pandemic in the mix in 2020, and those totals top 13 hours per day on screens for US adults.2

What does it mean when 10–13 hours every day are spent in media environments that are saturated with commercial messages? We are scrolling past hundreds of commercial messages that get optimized to be more enticing every day. What will happen to our social infrastructure and communities when virtually no one is interested in showing up for in-person activities? What happens to the brains of teenagers who instead of having real social interactions with friends and family, are spending more time “plugged into” screens than they spend in school and sleep—combined?

The short answer is we just don’t know. Will we, as humans, continue to adapt and increase our ability to deal with more information and more dissonance? Will we simply ignore the messages that we choose to bypass? Or will all this personalized, hyper-targeted media and commercial saturation begin to overwhelm our relationships and psyches?

For those of us in the marketing field, the question of how we respond to this media saturation is also relevant. Can our marketing campaigns continue to produce the results we seek when our target audiences are literally spending more than half of their lives being constantly exposed to commercial messages? At what point does the back of the media exposure camel just break and the three-legged stool of publishers/advertisers/audience stop working? What then? Do we as marketing professionals have a role to play in trying to lessen our target audience’s reliance (addiction?) to the very content that we need them to consume for our campaigns to continue to be effective? I guess we will just have to wait and see.