â–¶ Consumers Still Pained: Pressure on jobs and tight finances knocked consumer confidence levels around the world in Q3, with North Americans really feeling the pinch, cites Nielsen’s latest Global Consumer Confidence Index. Findings include:
• The economy remains the single greatest concern of 27% of North Americans. A further 10% of respondents in the U.S. cite health as their biggest worry.
• One in four North Americans and one in five Europeans say they have no discretionary income from month to month.
• Data for the first two quarters of this year suggested that consumers anticipated economic recovery. The latest figures show that sentiment decreased in almost half of the 53 markets measured.
Source: Nielsen
â–¶ Brands Beat Celebs: Twitter or Facebook users are more likely to follow brands than celebrities, a new report has found. The Opinion Matters and RMM survey reveals that 20.3% of social networkers are following brands, whereas only 13.4% follow celebrities. Additional findings include:
• Only 12.7% of the survey respondents claimed to give organizations feedback using social networks and only 11.2% watch branded content material such as TV commercials through their sites.
• Surprisingly, just 7.7% of people actually complain about a brand on a social network or forum.
• The most popular uses of social networking sites are viewing photographs of friends (55.9%) and planning social arrangements or getting information about events (34.8%).
Source: Opinion Matters/RMM
â–¶ Live TV-Watching Habits Shift: Consumers who have shifted the majority of their video viewing to non-live video content make up a significant portion of adult Internet users in the U.S., says a report by SAY Media, with comScore and TRU. This “Off-the-Grid” group represents nearly one-third of the adult online population—nearly 56 million people and growing. Other findings include:
• Within the Off-the-Grid segment, consumers can be further categorized into sub-groups of Opt Outs and On Demanders. Opt Outs, 13% of online consumers, have completely opted out of live TV and get their content by streaming across devices, through their DVR or via DVD. They consume 21 hours of video content in a week, half of which is online.
• On Demanders, 20% of online consumers, watch less live TV than they did one year ago and access video through a variety of devices. Time and device shifting allows this group to consume 30 hours of video each week, compared to the Internet average of 25 hours per week.
• Opt Outs are more receptive to online and mobile advertising, and also consume online content at unprecedented rates. Opt Outs spend two hours daily watching video content online (twice as much as the rest of Internet users). PRN
Source: Say Media/comScore/TRU