Last week was half term week in many UK schools, and my (primary school age) brood like many others were on holiday.
Now, according to Adland they should have been in front of that TV soaking up all the sponsors messages about overpriced toys, fat filled fast food and other things we parents are traditionally horrified about.
Should have been...but were they? Were they heck!
No, they were perched in front of the PC downloading others kids videos off YouTube and having a whale of a time. When not there, they were on MSN chatting to other kids in the class....or playing one of those multi user internet games where you chat to other players...a sort of sword and sworcery chatgroup.
This was apart from normal behaviour such as kicking footballs into neighbours' gardens and beating seven bells out of each other and so on, of course - kids are kids after all.
The point is that the time they now spend in front of the TV watching "kids" shows is a fraction of what it was even a few short years ago when you needed a bomb to remove them from Cartoon Network etc.
And I'm writing this on my laptop this evening, its TV prime time, and I'm not watching it. I've read a few blogs and emails, gone on to a few of my arcane interest chat groups and have had a wonderfully Ad Free evening. My wife is videocamming with her sister on msn. We don't even bother to use a PVR because the content on the 'net is what we absorb. The TV has been on in the background, while I've been typing...but its just so much aural wallpaper.
So, a typical day in a typical British household? Probably not yet...we are geeks after all...but by empirical observation (there are a *lot* of people on those chat groups etc out there) its a trend that is increasing rapidly. I see it all around me, and the sales of Broadband Internet, Webcams and growth of Intternet content bear me out....people are using this stuff, at night.
The thing that confuses me is that I have seen no major industry studies even mentioning this trend......if anything the popular wisdom is that we are watching more TV, not less. Just what is being measured?
Now, its been known for a while that even without TiVos and PVRs we engage in an enormous amount of TV Ad avoidance...but this is different...people are not avoiding the ads, they are just not watching TV. Period.
Is the Advertising industry as a whole waking up to it? Maybe they're the ones who the ratings insist are still watching all that TV.........
