Connected TV owners in the UK and Germany are young, successful, and more likely to be male, according to research carried out by Rovi and Parks Associates. The study looked at the profiles of connected TV owners in various markets and found the devices tend to be used by some of the more sought-after audience segments.
As well as looking at German and UK users of connected TV, the study looked at device-ownership in the USA, where users were similarly affluent but ownership was more evenly split down the middle between men and women (50 percent apiece).
Of the UK users, nearly 40 percent were ‘upper-middle class’. Over 70 percent closely follow the latest developments in new technology, and their ownership of other devices such as game consoles and tablets is considerably higher than the national average. For example, Rovi say these consumers are 7 times more likely to own a tablet than the average UK consumer.
German Market Still Heavily Male-Dominated
In Germany, a connected TV user is even more likely to be male, with percent of German owners. Rovi say that the Germans are active second screen users and a whopping 80 percent use Samsung’s Smart Hub Platform, the native connected TV platform that comes with Samsung connected TVs. Again, these are more likely to be early adopters, with 45 percent being the first amongst peers to buy new technology products and 67 percent keeping up-to-date with the latest technology.
One of the more interesting parts of the report focused on consumer attitudes towards connected TV advertising when the ads are placed with the connected TV user interface. More than half (54 percent) of users said they thought of the ads as content, which if you’re familiar with connected TV EPG ads, isn’t too surprising. There’s little or nothing to distinguish the ads from the content on most EPGs apart from the fact that an ad will often be positioned in one of the corners.
However, the connected TV ad networks need to be careful if they’re going to preserve the ‘content status’ of those ad units, which isn’t going to last very long if all the viewer gets is repurposed TV ads. Ads that are designed to work on TV or as pre and mid-roll rarely deliver for brands when dumped into non-interruptive advertising environments.
So perhaps the connected TV ad networks might be better off selling the EPG ad units to brands as content-only ad units rather than as standard ad units? After all, many brands struggle are struggling to work out how to get their branded content out to consumers (most end up using paid advertising to drive traffic to a website/YouTube page).
