It’s virtually impossible to talk about DVRs these days without getting into a discussion of media measurement. And many people who care about DVRs just aren’t ready to accept the fact that they’re not in the mainstream.
There’s a long-standing tradition in the technology community to paraphrase every new technology trend in terms of readily-identifiable individual behaviors. It used to take the form of technology executives sitting in airport lounges thinking about how they, or members of their family, use technology. These ideas were simple assertions that remained untested until a product was developed and introduced to the marketplace.
Now, this was a fine way to do things in B2B markets for routers, servers and enterprise software. The executives knew their clients, and there were established product management processes for incorporating feature requests and so on and so forth.
But things changed in two ways. First, technology companies started selling more and more things to consumers. Second, as this happened, more and more people started to care.
This larger audience of interested individuals changed the dynamic considerably. Now, any person with a computer or mobile device was an expert in new product development and mass market behavior.
The Problem
The only problem with this plethora of hypotheses about B2C markets is that — at some point — people use technology in different ways than we expect. Consumer marketers (at FMCG/CPG companies…not tech companies) know this issue very well, which is why they do a lot of research before they develop products. And once products have been developed, they are tested on a small scale in the marketplace before going past a go-no-go decision point and entering the market on a large scale.
The technology industry doesn’t have this luxury, because there is no real way to prototype and test a consumer electronics device without actually developing the device in full, testing it, and investing the money necessary to bring it to market. For some communications services, it may be 5-10 years (or more) from concept to introduction. So it’s unrealistic to test market something that far in advance…without actually going through the process of introducing it.
Boundary Issues
So if we accept that there are technology markets where product developers have to work with un-testable assertions of new product features and designs; we have to accept that there’s a point where we shift to measurable behavior and rely on hard data to understand how people use technology.
This is challenging for many technology hipsters who have come to believe that the rest of the world will follow their behaviors. After all, everyone they know is into technology and has integrated it into their daily lives. They have plenty of anecdotal evidence to explain why things are the way they are. And there’s no reason to change that underlying thinking.
Until the rest of the world zags when the hipsters zig. It happens, and it’s bound to happen more often.
Case In Point: DVR
Everyone in the media industry saw the early-adopter behaviors around digital video recorders (DVR), and they were worried. Surveys of TiVO owners showed that the vast majority of DVR users were recording programs and using their DVRs to skip the commercials. Amongst these early adopters, it was common for people to begin recording a show and to then start watching 12-15 minutes in (for an hour-long show), skip the commercials and finish at the same time as the linear broadcast.
And the media industry was concerned about new Nielsen ratings that would measure the audience for commercials for linear broadcast plus 3- and 7-days of DVR playback. Concerned is an understatement.
But now that we’ve had the technology in the field and have been able to measure actual consumer behavior, the findings are surprising and counter-intuitive.
It turns out that people with DVRs are more likely to watch the commercials. More likely than the people who are watching live. So, for a number of television programs, the new DVR-inclusive ratings have led to increased advertising revenues.
Hipsters Unwilling To Accept Measured Data
In industries familiar with large-scale consumer measurement (media, advertising, CPG, etc.), the response is very different: we thought DVR would be a problem, but the data says otherwise. So I guess we dodged that bullet.
To depart from my argument that anecdote is bad, I’ll point to my own anecdotal evidence that — in the face of large-scale measured consumer data — many technology early adopters are unwilling to accept the findings. I have encountered significant resistance in presenting this DVR data to people in the technology industry. The common response is something to the effect of, “well, I used my DVR last night to skip advertising. So we really need to investigate how Nielsen measures this, because it doesn’t make sense to me.”
Coming To Terms
We just need to accept that every technology has its moment of truth — a time when people either buy it or not…or use it the way we expected. And if that’s different from the way we planned, we just need to accept this and move forward.
Because people are different, and very few of us are in the mainstream in each and every way. This has been the case with technology early adopters, and it will continue to be so for Mr and Ms Hipster as they transition into other stages of life.
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