Another Survey Confirms The Trend Towards A Tech Future

Wednesday, 14 September 2011 00:00

Written by Resti Reyes. Jr.

A new survey from Synovate indicates that Filipinos are rapidly changing their lifestyles, particularly their media consumption habits. The study reveals that almost half of consumers—regardless of age, gender, location and social class—have already migrated to the Internet to access media and entertainment.

This confirms earlier predictions that 2011 is the year of the “tipping point” as far as the internet in the Philippines is concerned. This is the year that the majority of people will switch from the old traditional tri-media infrastructure – TV, radio, print, and then others (like outdoor) – to the new formulation of the media landscape: internet, television, print, radio, outdoor (also called “out-of-home”). The internet alone will have several platforms: it will come in three screen sizes – the desktop PC monitor would be “large”, the mobile phone would be “small”, and in between them, laptops, netbooks, and a new product category called the tablet PC would be “medium”. If you don’t believe that mobile phones belong among internet connection devices, consider this: the number of smartphones – phones that are actually tiny computers that can surf the web, have more than tripled from a mere 12% to 42% in the last three years. The large screen is of course already very close to merging with television, as a new generation of large displays are already dubbed as “smart” screens – capable of showing both television programming and internet websites – particularly useful for video sites like YouTube.

The most revealing stats came from the 15-24 year old age group, where the jump was from 57% to 71%. While television remains on top of the list among media choices of the population, Internet users have grown continuously from only 32% of the country’s urban population in 2007 to 47% this year – a figure that we predict will easily go over the 50% midway mark before the year is over.

Previous surveys from Nielsen Media Research and TNS, or Taylor-Nelson Sofres, had been showing a steady and accelerating trend towards a future built around technology. Both companies had been doing survey after survey and always, the results showed that there is no stopping progress and the onslaught of ever more advanced technology particularly in the field of communications and information technology. Moore’s Law - the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. He predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. More recently, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and continues to do so. This is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades.

The growth in computing power coupled with parallel developments that result in the erosion of hardware prices (you can buy a netbook for around P12,000, or a China-made tablet PC for as little as P3,000), plus greater and cheaper accessibility of broadband services, will all contribute to a continuously accelerating pace of conversion from old to new tech. We have seen how far this can go in the more advanced economies, where the internet has all but killed the print media, and perhaps radio as well. Major newspapers all over the developed world are folding up one by one, as their readers switch to the internet as their main source of news, information, and entertainment. The year 2009 was the year that the newspaper died, as announced by thebusinessinsider.com, while another website, newspaperdeathwatch.com, has been keeping a list of all the titles that have been shuttered since 2007.

Back here at home, we have also already seen how the advance of the internet has forced other media to adapt if they want to survive. We saw this in the “masa-fication” of FM radio in Metro Manila – where all but a couple of stations have been changing their programming formats to cater to a decidedly downscale audience. The lower classes tend to dominate radio listenership surveys not just out of sheer number, but also because of the research methodology being used in the surveys – typically household based. They rarely ever get to ask the guy who sits in the back seat of his Mercedes listening to Radio High while his driver sweats it out maneuvering through traffic. Upscale listeners are a dying breed, and in some cases, this can be taken quite literally. Take for example the listeners of DWBR 104.7, and DZRJ 100.3 – one plays mainstream standards from the likes of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, while the other one plays good old rock n’ roll from the Elvis Presley and Beatles era. You can guess how old their listeners would be. They are either senior citizens, or very senior citizens.

Going back to the Synovate study, Aileen Tuangco, business development manager of Synovate, was quick to point out that the survey shows that the decline in the readership of traditional print media seems to have been arrested this year, with readership bottoming out at 30% of the population. “What’s important is that this 30% is made up of the more affluent sections of society,” she said. The statement confirms the existence of a digital divide. But the strange thing is that, it is the affluent few who are not so techie, and it is the young but upwardly mobile that are tech-savvy. The older, wealthier consumers are used to their old ways. The young and restless are at the forefront of new technology. Eventually, of course, just like the radio audiences ahead of them, the newspaper audiences will also die out one by one, and that 30% figure will gradually go down as their numbers decline. It will be most interesting to watch which title will be the last man standing.
Carole Sarthou, the managing director of Synovate Philippines, adds, “Based on these figures and on the resulting psychographic analysis done on the data, the Internet may be considered a real challenge to print and radio as an advertising medium, with 25% of the respondents finding it an effective medium for advertisements compared to the leading medium—TV—with 37%.” Next to TV, 27% of the respondents consider the mobile phone as the medium they plan to use more often.

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