Josh Rammell, digital account strategist at MC&C looks at why tablets are the best route to reaching an older generation and how best to go about it.
There was a viral video doing the rounds in 2010, which saw a daughter buy her elderly dad an iPad for Christmas. As her parents prepared the Christmas lunch, the daughter walks into the kitchen to find her dad happily, but mistakenly, using the iPad as a chopping board to slice up the carrots. During the five years after 2010, this video would have made increasingly less sense. Since the debut of Apple’s iPad in 2010, and the subsequent arrival of rival products such as Amazon Fire, the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Google Nexus, there has been an explosion in the popularity of tablets, especially amongst the older generations, which has shaped the way they use the internet and watch TV.
According to a recent report by UK media regulator Ofcom, the proportion of UK households that own a tablet rose from just 2% in 2011 to 54% in 2015. For the over 55s (a generation considered not particularly keen on new technology), tablet ownership grew from 1% in 2011 to 37% by 2015. They’ve gone from chopping boards to silver surf boards. As a result, accessing the internet via tablets has grown to become the second most popular way for our parents’ generation to get online. But what are they doing on their tablets and is anyone properly marketing to them? Ofcom figures further tell us that some 84% of mobile device owners use a tablet as a second-screen whilst watching television. It is common for the Baby Boomers to be sat watching freeview television whilst perusing social media and shopping online. In truth, the over 55s are a major use of social. Alright, it’s not Snapchat, but for 88% it’s Facebook that makes up their main social use.
The point is that they’re using the tablet as a second screen in all manner of ways while watching television and this makes them an ideal demographic for dual screen targeting. Tablet usage is often thought of as being directly connected with smartphone usage but if second screen marketing strategies are smartphone dominant, marketers are missing a major trick. Like phones, tablets are mobile devices. But unlike phones, they are primarily used within, rather than outside the home. This makes it relatively easy and cost effective to tie specific television campaigns to continued tablet engagement in the knowledge that both activities are taking place inside the home.
This dual screening enables marketers to use the emotional engagement of television to drive a continued emotional engagement in digital media. If you’ve already tugged on the heartstrings via a television campaign, provide a reason to carry that interaction over to a tablet device and you’ll have people reaching to pick theirs up and continue the customer journey you’ve set them out on. As it stands, the media investment already exists so there’s very little budgetary spend to optimise the messaging. With the existing customer journey however, over half of all online transactions still happen on a desktop or laptop computer but they’re influenced by searching on mobile devices (Deloitte estimates that 36% of retail sales are mobile influenced). So, particularly for the over 55s, choosing things is easy on a tablet but it’s the payment processes that makes purchasing unappealing and more difficult. Filling in payment forms on a tablet is cumbersome and fiddly. This is no problem though, we all have that parent that will happily spend the evening searching for stuff but then make a purchase the following day by firing up the desktop computer at work, unless they have been using an app with their payment and address details stored from before.
The point is that traffic from tablet to website is growing but the conversion to sale rate remains lower than for traffic from desktops or laptops. Many advertisers are failing to create bespoke journeys for tablet users despite the cost and second-screen usage benefits. If they assume that one digital experience fits all consumer devices, they risk losing revenue to their competitors. The over 50s now account for half of all British consumer spending so marketers need to be blending this more mature tablet user into their digital targeting strategies. One way would be to consider the purchasing experience on tablets and either make it easier or alter the consumer journey. They need to understand how e-commerce traffic is migrating from desktop to tablets but instead of forcing users to undergo the same complex purchasing process, offer them further information instead and drive them to buy over the phone. We did this for one of our commercial clients and forecasted an 11% higher ROI as a result.
There’s lots of remarkably simple ways to ensure that over-55 tablet users benefit from a continuation of their engagement with TV advertising. This is no longer the forgotten generation as their love of the tablet means we know just how to reach out to them.
By Josh Rammell
Digital account strategist
MC&C