Last night I was sent the latest in the annual Olswang Convergence
Survey reports entitled ‘Does it add up?’. They surveyed 30 senior executives and 2000 adult consumers. The problem with reports like this is that you read them and find that almost every finding is blindingly obvious. I think I took a bit of a risk in declaring “2010 – the Year of the Tablet” in mid 2009. I think Olswang saying “we are confident that 2011 will be the year of the tablet” in March 11 is a little less cutting edge!
Another blindingly obvious finding was that people who didn’t own iPads did not expect to access digital newspapers in 2011. But 48% of those that had bought an iPad did intend to purchase digital newspapers in 2011. I understand that Steve Jobs rightly has a very poor opinion of the usefulness of asking consumers what they want. Henry Ford did too. Remember he said “"If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse." The point being that most people don’t actually know that they would like to access a digital newspaper until you give them a device which makes the process easy and pleasurable.
The report attests that watching linear (ie live) TV is still extremely popular as Strictly Come Dancing, X Factor etc will testify. Using the iPad as a ‘companion screen’ whilst watching this live TV is going to be (is already?) big business. Olswang quotes Endemol, the makers of the Channel 4 The Million Pound Drop, having built up an audience of 3m playing the game at the same time as the live TV – a ‘perfect’ App for the iPad.
Another finding that, perhaps, will come as no surprise to Hotviews readers is what answer you would get if you asked an 18-24 year old how he would spend a voucher of a set value on a number of music related things. 34% said ‘on a live event’ compared with 19% ‘on a CD’. See my Lessons from the music industry or just search ‘music’ in the archives. In the 1960s live concerts promoted recorded music. Now it’s exactly the other way around. The rest of the media industry should listen and learn because their industry is going the same way.
Anyway, click Olswang Convergence Survey for a longer read.