44% is the loneliest number

The IPA’s latest Making Sense report shows that our patterns of media consumption have held remarkably firm over the past 20 years.

We still tend to listen to more audio in the morning, for example, see more OOH ads during working hours, and watch more video in the evening. And while we read a little less than we used to, we still do it in the same way — at a consistent-but-relatively-low level throughout the day.

It’s comforting to know that the needs underpinning media consumption seem to be more or less invariable, but don’t be lulled into thinking it’s just the devices and channels that change.

According to the IPA, 44% of the time spent with commercial media is now spent alone, up from 40% in 2015. Among 16- to 34-year-olds specifically, the trend is even more pronounced, with solitary media consumption rising from 38% to 46%.

While neither of those increases looks dramatic, they are put into perspective by the Economic and Social Research Council’s time-use survey in 2000*, which found that just 28.2% of media time was spent alone.

Whether solitary media consumption is a trend that has now peaked or one that has further to run, it is a sustained shift that likely already has implications for how brands are built.

For one thing, Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial television, claims that ‘ad recall increases by 23% when watching with others’. Recall has its faults as a metric, and some of the reported uplift is probably because of the kind of content that people are more likely to watch together, but it is at least indicative that ads are more effective when served to groups.

The bigger — and admittedly more speculative — danger is that the atomisation of media will weaken the signalling power of brands. One of the reasons people buy brands is that they know what these markers mean to other people, and being seen to use certain products reinforces their own desired identity.

In and of itself, solitary consumption doesn’t necessarily interfere with that. But it will when it’s combined with personalised messaging, which erodes the assumption that others will see the same thing. And this is a hard thing for marketers to resist, given that solitary consumption more often takes place on personal accounts or devices, which are easier to target and track. What gets measured gets favoured. One-to-one marketing has its place, of course, in CRM and loyalty and other owned channels. It’s just overrepresented in most marketing plans as it is.

One likely consequence of all this is that the live events and broadcasts that can guarantee a large simultaneous audience will become even more sought after by advertisers — at least, those that can afford them — as one of the few remaining channels through which brands can become properly famous.

Livestreamers, too, might attract more advertiser attention on the basis of the size of their simultaneous audience, as might non-livestreaming creators, who have the next best thing — lots of viewers who leave evidence of their participation through comments and shares.

Logically, out-of-home advertising also stands to benefit, since it is usually very obviously delivering the same message to lots of people at the same time. It is also, according to the IPA, the only channel that now consistently reaches more than 90% of consumers each week.

Within the Making Sense report, WPP Media’s Richard Kirk writes an article lamenting that fragmenting media has led many marketers to settle for pursuing niches and ‘lots of littles’, to their own detriment.

‘In a galaxy of fragmented media dust,’ he writes, ‘don’t spread your budget into a thin, invisible nebula. Win by going supernova, creating a supermassive [black] hole; campaigns with so much mass, scale, and cultural gravity that they inescapably suck in attention.’

In the same vein, marketers shouldn’t lean into a lonely media ecosystem by shrinking their ambitions to fit it. Brands must not forget how to command a room, even if there’s just one person in it.

*I used Claude to interpret raw diary data held by the UK Data Service to get this figure, which is for ‘all mass media’ consumed, rather than just commercial media.

More findings from the IPA report (which was based on a representative sample of over 6,000 adults living in Great Britain)

• GB adults spend 8hrs 14mins with curated media each day, down from 8hrs 27mins in 2025. The share of that time spent with commercial media has increased from 66% to 68% over the same period.
• Time spent with curated media each day among 16- to 34-year-olds has dropped more precipitously, however, from 8hrs 13mins to 7hrs 46mins, over that same time period.
• OOH has suffered a slight decline in reach (2 percentage points) over the past decade, most likely as a result of more people working from home. But it is the only channel that consistently reaches more than 90% of consumers per week.
• YouTube is now among the top five media properties among over 75s, measured by weekly reach. Facebook is in there, too. The rest are national broadcasters.
• Among all adults, 34% of time spent with curated commercial media is on mobile devices — the same share claimed by TV.