August 23, 2007
PR Disasters » Ofcom (UK) Communications Trends & Use Findings
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My ol’ mate Gerry ‘Pacemaker’ McCusker is over in blighty at the moment (the UK for those unsure of what ‘blighty’ stands for).
There is a report available from Ofcom, the government body that oversees all digital communication/broadcasting within the UK, and Gerry provides a nicely succinct precis of it on his PR Disasters blog.
To wit:
“statistics suggest that in terms of Gross Value Added, telecoms, broadcasting and the content-related components of the creative industries contribute over three times as much as the UK’s electricity, gas and water supply industries combined.” See, we media types do contribute something to society after all!
“More time was spent on eBay than on any other web site, and social networking sites Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are all in the top ten sites by time spent. Women aged 25-34 spend over 20% more time online than their male counterparts.
“Bundled communications services are increasingly popular with consumers, and each person now consumes more than seven hours of media and communications services cumulatively per day.”
Yes, you read that right — we now inhabit a virtual world for at least 7 hours out of 24. Add in the hours spent at work hunched over a computer (if you are a white collar worker) and you can be spending anywhere between one third and two thirds of your day in a virtual, non face-to-face environment.
The alarm is the mobile handset feature which has the highest substitutional impact on stand-alone devices, followed by the camera. A significant minority of people also say their mobile is substituting for their stand-alone portable music player or games console.
If I go back to my chat with IBM’s David Boloker nearly a year ago, David predicted that where 2007 would be the ‘Year of the Widget’, 2008 would be the ‘Year of the Mobile Platform’ and that what Apple was doing with the iPhone was more than just joining the Nokia-led mobile phone bandwagon, it was radically shaking up the complacent mobile phone industry by bringing a whole new mentality to it, a mentality not born of the telecoms industry but of the computer-based entertainment and productivity industry.
Gerry’s synopsis of the Oftel report is great brain food — I encourage you to whip over to his blog and have a read.
Stumble it!
Filed under: marketing, miscellaneous
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