And the award for best fictional representation of My Media Week goes to…

A new series of blogs about the broadcast industry, narrated by David Brennan…

One of the guilty pleasures of working in the media industry used to be reading the ubiquitous ‘My Media Week’ feature in the trade press that detailed the media routines of the industry’s movers and shakers. I’ve been reading them regularly since I first started my media career in 1980 – I’ve even been the subject of a few – and an overriding pattern can be seen that initially shocked me but now rarely merits a second thought.

In these articles, we tend to hear of a ravenous appetite for news and ‘serious’ topics such as business coverage, the world around us and the latest goings-on in Ambridge, but precious little time for more frivolous entertainments. The titans of our industry would stack quality newspapers high, read upmarket magazines during snatched ‘me-moments’ and listen to (usually BBC) radio as part of their regular commute, but they could rarely find the time to watch TV at all, apart from the late evening news (they rarely get home before 9pm) and the occasional documentary or current affairs programme.

Perhaps the most high profile example in recent times has been Sir Chris Patten who, on the announcement that he had been appointed as chairman of the BBC, ‘came out’ and admitted that he “hardly ever watches television”. He made the point that he tends to limit his viewing to news and current affairs because “I watch the programmes that you’d expect somebody of my background to. That’s who I am: I’m 66, white and well educated”. So, no change to the script there then. Although he seems to be trying to make up for it, having more recently informed the world he had watched Dr Who, So You Think You Can Dance and Wallander in one weekend; now there is a man who will do whatever it takes to get the job done!

But how can this be? When the average full-time business manager watches around 20 hours of TV every week – and their top programmes include The X Factor, Downton Abbey and My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding – then I have to ask; are our own business leaders really so different to their peers in other industries? I suspect not, but there are two clear influences at work here; self-representation and under-claim.

Self-representation has always been a significant problem in market research. It is likely to be an even bigger problem when one’s opinions are going to be published! It works on the basis that the information we offer about ourselves is likely to be based more on how we would like to be perceived by others than how we truly think or behave.

If we consider how this may affect any business leader, we would expect them to want to show a serious, focused nature, with no time for frippery. Consequently, they will claim that they don’t have time for television generally, and therefore need to be very selective about how they use it. Much better to appear ‘always-on’ and ready for action. So, it is perhaps understandable that even those business leaders who invest a lot of money in TV or are responsible for the medium’s development would not think twice about admitting they rarely engage in the viewing experiences that their viewers and consumers are enjoying for several hours every day.

But this phenomenon is not just a by-product of self-representation; it is also indicative of a negative bias which is common to television – natural under-claim of what is a passive and absorbing activity in favour of those experiences that are more active, goal-oriented and attention-based.

Traditionally, we have always assumed that these latter behaviours are more ‘valuable’ to advertisers, but recent breakthroughs in our understanding about how advertising works, such as Robert Heath’s theory of low involvement processing , suggest this isn’t really the case and that the natural under-claim of more passive (but often more engaging) activities may actually be working in the opposite way.

A few years ago, Thinkbox conducted an engagement study where they observed the TV viewing of more than 70 people across six weeks, watching them view more than 17,000 commercial breaks in the process. Even though the respondents knew that we had recorded every second of TV they had watched, they still massively under-represented the amount of ‘traditional’ TV they had viewed in favour of more active, lean-forward alternatives, when they filled in the post-study questionnaire about their viewing habits. This is why surveys based on asking people to estimate their viewing hours are producing ridiculous data.

So perhaps we ought to take these anecdotal descriptions of the media experiences of our industry leaders in much the same way; as an interesting anecdote or guilty pleasure that provides an understandably incomplete picture into how we (or they) really spend their time. Alternatively, we could see them as extreme examples of a problem with research, which is based on asking stupid questions, which then get the answers they deserve!