Study: Mobile Native Video Holds The Key To Reaching Influential Millennial Moms Demographic

This research is part of Sharethrough's Millennial Insights Project. The full Millennial Moms report can be downloaded here.

Introduction

"The Millennial mom is a different mom. [She] is a different consumer...the way in which they interact with brands and the brands that come into their home and how they touch, feel and interact has dramatically shifted.”

- Lori Pantel, VP, North American Marketing, Mattell

There is no target audience that better represents the challenges and rewards of the changing media climate than Millennial Moms, one of the most time-pressured and digitally savvy demographics in America, growing rapidly and representing a huge amount of household spending each year.

The fact that Millennial Moms, like most younger demographics, are spending less and less time watching video away from a traditional screen, is a part of a much larger shift of TV ad dollars across to digital. Forty percent of brands surveyed by RBC and Advertising Age in 2016 said that digital budgets were being directly taken out of TV spending and an AOL report estimated that as much as 10 percent of TV dollars would be lost to digital advertising in 2016. At Sharethrough, we work with everyone from Cadillac to Gilt on high-impact native video campaigns, both extending the reach of their broadcast ad efforts and executing unique media strategies.

Native video has emerged as a premium new video format for brands moving their ad investment online, but reaching Millennial Moms, masters of digital multitasking and the primary gatekeepers of household income, requires careful consideration.

The quirks of the Millennial generation (those between the ages of 18-34) have been almost overexposed in the last couple of years, but Millennial Moms are a unique and relatively unexplored subset of this. Juggling the responsibilities of work, family and personal time forces Millennial Mom’s to multitask in all facets of life. A lack of time is a major driving force behind Millennial Mom’s need to be smart and efficient with their content consumption. To them having a more focused search strategy outweighs the stereotypical Millennial preference for endless in-feed scrolling on social sites.

Methodology

To break down the digital habits of Millennial Moms, Sharethrough conducted a comprehensive survey to gather information on how they choose to watch video online and how native ads, headlines and autoplay affect their content experience. Sharethrough conducted a survey using Qualtrics, of 1050 participants ranging in age from 18-65 (broken out into Millennials in general, Millennial Moms, and non-Millennial Moms) to gain a better understanding on how Millennial Moms interact with content online and where they stand out in comparison to other generations.

Results

• Ninety-six percent of Millennial Moms watch mobile video regularly, with over 25 percent watching more than one hour each day.
• More millennial moms watch video each day on their smartphone than any other device: 65 percent of millennial moms watch on their smartphones, more than TV (62 percent), and twice as much as those that watch on their computer (33 percent).
• Sixty-two percent of Millennial Moms said their smartphone was their primary online device, more than laptops, desktops and tablets.

• Millennial Moms were much less likely to watch video on Instagram and Snapchat each day than their childless equivalents. 24 percent of Millennial Moms said that they watched video on Snapchat each day, compared to 50 percent of Millennials. 42 percent of Millennials watch video on Instagram each day, compared to 29 percent for Millennial Moms.
• Conversely, Millennial Moms are twice as likely to watch mobile video daily on editorial sites than Non-Mom Millennials (30 percent to 18 percent).

• Thirty percent of Millennial moms said that they have clicked on a native ad within the last 90 days, compared to only 17 percent of moms 35 and over.
• The most influential factors for Millennial Moms engaging with native ads were headlines (94 percent said they were influential) and autoplay (83 percent said they enjoyed the experience).