We Found Them: TV’s Missing 18-34-Year-Old Male.

In BIGresearch’s latest installment of its twice annual Simultaneous Media Usage Survey (n=13,414), BIGresearch confirmed Nielsen’s determination — that 18 to 34 year old men aren’t watching as much TV as a year ago.

In fact, that age group, said Joe Pilotta, vice president of research, is instead going online, playing video games and listening to radio.

“In today’s culture, television is an intermittent companion,” Pilotta said. “People have it on while they’re doing other things. To treat it as if it were new to all, or as the only activity a consumer is taking part in, does not take into account the impact of the intermittent activity.”

The twice-annual Simultaneous Media Usage Survey (SIMM) quantifies how the public consumes media and the impact those patterns have on buying habits in a fragmented and changing marketplace.

Of the 18-34 year old men surveyed, 57.5 percent play video games while 72 percent surf the Internet. 67 percent watch movies and 71 percent listen to the radio. Simultaneous use of online and radio media among 25 to 34 year old males has increased while simultaneous TV and online usage has decreased. Simultaneous usage of TV and magazines is also on the decline in this group.

Since August of 2002, viewership among males 18-24 has gone down 8.8 percent while that among those 25-34 is down 12.2 percent. Those men who live at home with their parents are significantly less involved with media than those who are on their own, Pilotta said. Similarly, activities in and out of the home are having an impact on how those consumers spend their time.

On the whole, however, media usage among males between the ages of 18 and 34 years is on the decline — newspaper, magazine and TV watching is down, most notably on the younger side of that category. Male TV watchers from 18 to 24 are down 13 percent and those who read newspapers in that age group is down 10.5 percent.

“The SIMM survey demonstrates how consumers use of media has changed. By using SIMM, advertisers and media planners can develop a roadmap to better allocate ad dollars for greater ROI,” Pilotta said.

For more information at http://www.bigresearch.com