Three Things Datebook for the Week of 2/7/2022
On the Datebook is The State of Mobile 2022. Plus, the NPR Board and committees gather over the next two weeks. And more brands, more ads, more shows, and more $$!
THING ONE: Goin’ Mobile
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the time spent on mobile devices continues to increase as we find more uses than ever for our handheld devices. Research from the mobile analytics firm App Annie reports that consumers in the top mobile-first markets across the globe spend 4.8 hours per day using mobile apps.
In looking back at 2021, more commerce was conducted on mobile apps, and consumers themselves were engaging with more apps than ever before as globally over 435,000 apps per minute were downloaded last year.
The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV a day. By contrast, according to App Annie Intelligence, in 2021 they spent 4.1 hours each day on their mobile device, which comes to nearly 195 trillion hours of usage.
To help get a sense of the mobile ecosystem and plan future strategy, App Annie will share trends and answer questions with a webinar, The State of Mobile 2022, this Wednesday, February 9, 2022, at 4:00 pm (Eastern).
Among the items to be discussed include:
How industries are transforming on mobile; in verticals such as gaming, retail, finance, media/publishing, social networking, and advertising
How to capitalize on the 4.8 daily hours spent on mobile
Where different age demographics are opening their mobile wallets with mobile apps
The data from App Annie reports that Photo & Video, Entertainment, Education, and Social apps are the clear choices of Gen Z. The research notes that Instagram is ranked #1 or #2 in all seven global markets) by Monthly Active Users by likelihood of use. However, TikTok is closing fast, appearing in the top 5 lists of 6 out of 7 markets for Gen Z.
At the opposite end of the age range, the app preferences of Gen X / Baby Boomers are similar among all markets. Weather, News, and Medical score highest in virtually all countries for the older age group. Annie App’s research notes that in some markets, categories were more modestly skewed towards a demographic cohort, meaning they are more similar to the population overall. However, the gap is especially high in Western markets.
For example, in Canada, the index for Weather is Gen X/ Baby Boomer (148), Millennial (101), and Gen Z (56), meaning Gen X/ Baby Boomers are 48% more likely to use Weather apps than the average population.
The gaming portion of the mobile ecosystem also fascinates me because I continue to think about how public media could develop a gaming strategy that aligns with our mission. We’re surely seeing The New York Times embracing games as a vertical, as reflected by its purchase last week of Wordle.
While we’re on the subject of mobile apps, a quick follow-up from last week’s post where I encouraged NPR and member stations to try an experience following the lead of what the BBC is doing with its BBC Sounds app. The idea is to place some popular NPR podcasts exclusively on NPR One for a period of time, maybe a month, to see if that will positively impact public radio’s own digital platform.
On Friday, Edison Research guru Tom Webster promoted Edison’s upcoming Super Listener study webinar in his I Hear Things newsletter. Webster shared that one finding from the study was that 87% of the heaviest users of podcasts would be willing to pick up stakes and migrate to that specific service if it were exclusively offered only on that platform.
That’s a pretty powerful finding that could give public radio leaders some food for thought on strategies for using its own platform. Of course, Webster notes that this is a relatively small sample, 1,000 weekly podcast listeners who listen to more than five hours of podcasts per week, but it’s definitely worth further consideration.
In addition, Webster points to how most of us think nothing about using multiple apps for our video viewing pleasure as we seamlessly switch between Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, HBO Max, and others to find our favorite shows.
So why should audio be any different?
By the way, the Super Listeners webinar is next week, Wednesday, February 16, 2022, at 2:00 pm (Eastern). You can register with this link.
THING TWO: It’s NPR Board Meeting Time
The quarterly NPR, Inc. Board of Directors committees and full board will be meeting virtually over the next two weeks.
If you’re interested in attending the open sessions of the virtual meetings of the committees or the entire board, you should contact the NPR Board Liaison1 at boardliaison@npr.org at least one day before the meeting begins.
Here’s the meeting rundown for this week.
Tuesday, February 8, 2022 (all times are Eastern)
10:00 am - 12:30 pm Investment Committee: As it often does, this combined committee of NPR Board members and NPR Foundation Trustees will conduct its full meeting in closed session.
1:00 - 2:30 pm DEI Committee: I’m sure this committee will have plenty to discuss with recent staff departures and very public statements from NPR staff regarding those departures. However, most of those discussions will occur in Executive Session since the only public agenda items are the approval of minutes from the November 2021 meeting, unstated new business, and public comment. The committee is co-chaired by Fred Dust and LaFontaine Oliver with committee members Tina Pamintuan, Erika Pulley-Hayes, Judith Segura, and Telisa Yancy.
3:00 - 4:30 pm Membership Committee: The public agenda for this meeting is basically the same docket presented for the committee’s November 2021 meeting. You can see the agenda here.
Wednesday, February 9, 2022 (all times are Eastern)
1:30–3:00 pm Governance Committee: The public agenda for the Governance Committee will include a conversation regarding the upcoming board elections, both the schedule and process, as well as a discussion of Director openings in 2022 and 2023.
There are four Member Director positions up for this year’s election. Current Board Chair LaFontaine Oliver of WYPR-FM and Jay Pearce of WVIK-FM will be terming out to conclude their second three-year term on the board. This means that there will be at least two open positions this year. In addition, Joe O’Connor of WFAE and Mike Savage of WEKU will be eligible for a second three-year term should they decide to run again, and the committee chooses to place them on the slate.
Last year, three petition candidates were added to the ballot following the Governance Committee’s nomination of four candidates to the slate. I’m sure that will be an item that the committee will discuss as it plans for this year’s slate.
In addition, The committee will most likely discuss the one Public Director vacancy following Carlos Watson’s resignation last fall. Both of these discussions will probably take place in executive session.
For interested AREPS, there’s still time to submit an expression of interest to serve on the board, with details in the footnotes below. 2
3:30 - 5:00 pm Finance Committee: The public agenda of the Finance Committee will include a review of NPR’s financials through the first quarter of its fiscal year, which should be of interest to member stations and others in the system. I had not noticed before this meeting that there are now three members of the NPR Foundation serving on the committee: Janet Clark, Jamie Grant, and Gwen Norton. For what it’s worth, there are more NPR Foundation Trustees on the Finance Committee than there are Member Directors.
Thursday, February 10, 2022 (all times are Eastern)
11:00 am -12:30 pm Development Committee: In a similar vein to the Membership Committee, the agenda for the public portion of the Development Committee meeting mirrors the November 2021 public meeting agenda. In public session, the committee will receive an update on the Collaborative Fundraising initiative with stations and hear the latest from NPR Foundation Board chair John McGinn.
1:00 - 2:30 pm Audit Committee: The Audit Committee will be meeting exclusively in executive session.
3:30 - 5:00 pm D/I Committee: The Distribution/Interconnection Committee will have several items on the public meeting agenda, including discussing proposed rates and fees policy changes. One item of note in the committee’s make-up this year is that a Public Director, Judy Segura, is now the committee’s vice-chair3. I think it’s great to have more public director involvement on this committee, and Segura’s background as the lead thermal architect and expert in thermodynamics at Apple should bring some innovative thinking to the group.
The full meeting of the NPR, Inc. Board will then take place virtually next week: Wednesday, February 16, 2022, and Thursday, February 17, 2022. I’ll have some observations on the agenda for the board meeting in next week’s Datebook.
THING THREE: Podcasting - More Brands, More Ads, More Shows, More $$
The advertising spend for podcasting in the U.S. exploded last year in new data released last month from the advertising intelligence firm MediaRadar.
Overall advertising investments in the platform jumped 21% in 2021, with double-digit growth across various industries led by tech, media, and finance. The top ten categories accounted for 83% of the total podcast spend last year.
While podcasting is still one of the younger media platforms, its growth is skyrocketing. Statista’s research notes that back in 2006, only 22 percent of the adult population in the United States was aware of podcasting. By 2021, this figure had risen to 78 percent.
Podcasting is an increasingly popular pastime in the U.S., with an estimated 120 million podcast listeners in the country in 2021.
The MediaRadar analysis identified the top ten podcast advertisers accounted for 15.9% of the overall 2021 spending. Those leading advertisers were:
Teladoc Health (BetterHelp)
Berkshire Hathaway (GEICO)
Capital One
ZipRecruiter
SimpliSafe
Comcast
Amazon
Squarespace
Coors
Progressive
Another interesting piece of data from the MediaRadar research looked at how advertisers inserted their ads into episodes: 26% of ads are pre-roll, 55% are mid-roll, and 19% are post-roll. Close to half (42%) of the ads are 30-second spots.
To give you a more in-depth look at the state of podcast advertising from last year and look ahead to the coming year, the podcast media planning platform Magellan AI is hosting a webinar on Thursday, February 10, 2022, at 2:00 pm (Eastern).
The webinar will analyze how advertisers’ behavior changed throughout the year. The session will also share info about where new brands to podcasters were placing their ads and how much they spent, how the top spenders changed in each quarter last year, and discuss industry trends in ad load, ad length, and dynamic insertion.
The team at Magellan AI also promises exclusive access to its Q4 Benchmark Report at the end of the webinar before they share it with everyone.
To register for the free 45-minute session, click on this link to sign up.
One More Thing.
I’ve been fascinated by the speed at which video viewing habits have changed over the past years and have been monitoring the impact of this on local television stations. And I think that there are lessons that radio can learn from what’s happening on the television side of the media landscape.
So when I saw this webinar pop-up on my feed this past weekend I thought it was worth mentioning in this edition of the Datebook.
TVNewsCheck is sponsoring a session on Friday, February 11, 2022, at 1:00 pm (Eastern) looking at what some local television leaders are doing to expand their audience not just on linear TV but also on the web, mobile, and direct-to-consumer channels.
The goal is about deepening engagement and many are going the route of newsletters, user-generated content, citizen journalism and drastically evolving uses of social media all in the effort to grow audiences.
The webinar is moderated by TVNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp with a panel of leaders4 from across the commercial TV industry.
Here’s the link to register if you want to attend.
That’s the Datebook for this week. Thanks for reading and if you have any comments or suggestions for the newsletter, please drop me a note. Thanks.
The NPR Board liaison is the amazing Twanna Clark!
Expressions of interest should be sent as e-mail attachments (preferably in MS Word or pdf format) to Twanna Clark, Manager, Board Relations, at tclark1@npr.org, with the subject line “Member Director Nominations.” These expressions of interest must be received by the close of business this Tuesday, February 8, 2022 (although the Governance Committee reserves the right to extend the due date).
Segura was a member of the committee last year but has been elevated to the Vice-Chair role this year,
The panel includes Ken Haddad, Special Projects Manager, WDIV|Detroit; Jennifer Rigby, News Director, WXIA|Atlanta; Joanie Vasiliadis, VP Digital Content, Tegna; Apryl Pilolli, Head of Product and Innovation, Social News Desk; Manny Fantis, Senior Director of Digital News and Publishing, Sinclair Broadcast Group; and Tim Wolff, VP of TV & Digital Publishing Innovation, Futuri.