Personal Media Day (WP2)

WP Leader: Kristiina Markkula, Finnmedia, kristiina.markkula(at)vkl.fi
Future media scene – however you define it – will be characterised by abundance of content. This challenges the development of media content and services to meet the demand with right content via right channels at right time. Personal Media Day studies how people use media, their motivations to use media and needs behind media usage, and develops concepts and prototypes for new content services to be tested by users, including their business models. Personal Media Day work package started at the beginning of 2012.
What kind of new services media can offer for consumers in few years? What draws to use certain media service? What are the motives behind the choices?
These are some of the research questions that are studied in Personal Media Day work package. Consumer/user research studies the role of media during day and week. How does the media usage alter during day or week? What are the most relevant media services and the ways to use them? Can there be found spots in consumer’s day or week in which media could offer something new or in a new way?
There is a lot of information and research results available about media usage, but the information is scattered, the publicity often restricted, and the use of the results varies from advertising sales support to product or service development. One target for PMD is to collect and produce information that can be used freely by media companies.
Main target for consumer/user research is to give input to development of new media concepts and services. New content- or service ideas are created and tested with users all the way from concepts to prototypes and products. The objective is to develop technologies and service concepts that enable media service providers to utilise content coming from different sources and content providers and offer relevant media content and services in different contexts to end users.
In 2012 in Personal Media day the research areas were
How people use media
  • How everyday life and media usage is formed
  • What are the motives to use media
  • How media usage is changing and developing
  • How lead-users use media
  • Social dimensions of media usage
  • Consumer resistance (- why people do not use media)
What kind of new media products and services can be innovated?
  • How consumer profiles can be exploited in best possible way in order to offer interesting content services in different contexts. Possibilities in utilising profiles and personalising content based on them, has a lot of potential both regarding the media content itself and advertising.
  • What is media multitasking and what does it mean for media companies? Media multitasking may offer opportunities to deepen the user experience but contents can also disturb each other. What are the factors that reinforce and undermine media multitasking experience?
New business models
  • What kind of new possibilities digital, especially mobile usage gives for advertising
The research in 2013 focuses around same main themes.
Consumer research
Media engagement and motives
The aim of this task is to get deeper understanding of everyday media practices, use value and engagement with media. In the task the research is concentrated to certain media products. Other aim is to produce cookbook for media companies, how they can use methods tested and used in this task in their concept and product development.
(Understanding everyday media practices, use value and engagement with media are essential for the creation and adoption of new media service concepts and business models.) It is not enough to know how much time is spent daily with certain media or how the daily rhythm effects media use in general. The use of media is based on personal needs which motivate the use of diverse media services during the day.
To understand changing media practices and user needs it is essential to understand the whole media sphere of users, not just compare one media title to its competitors. In media usage research it is important to include the whole media content: journalistic content, advertising content, user-generated content and value-added services
Several research methods are used in the research to get a better understanding of individual media use and its motivations: surveys, web based media diaries, q-sorting methods for focusing on media title importance, and small episodes of visual ethnography.
Research questions
  • What motivates readers/users to use different media titles and become engaged or disengaged? What kind of engagement leads to lasting readership relations?
  • What kind of media products and media titles form the media sphere of an individual media user?
  • What use needs do different media fulfill?
  • What kind of new media concepts could be developed based on the information gained?
Surveying social user roles of news audiences
The objective of the task is to develop a survey research concept that would give knowledge of regional media usage and especially what kinds of user roles people have regarding to news and different news media.
Building on both academic and commercial user study traditions and work already done in Next Media, this task develops new methods for audience research and also produces concrete, generalizable data for the use of media companies.
The task grasps three topics where new solutions are needed. First, the task creates a survey concept that produces user profiles based on concrete daily media practices and user roles (not overall lifestyles or values as general consumer research, like RISC, does). Second, this survey concept is tailored for the needs of regional media so that they get knowledge of the needs and practices of the people exactly in their circulation area. Third, the data produced with the task “automatic media exposure tracking” is tested for its possibilities to give more contextual and accurate information of people’s media use.
Research questions:
  • How different media and media platforms are used in specific regions, and what kinds of social roles the users take in different contexts and situations?
  • What kinds of distinct user profiles can be found according to the media use, using contexts and user roles?
  • How the survey methodology can be used for testing the results of qualitative user studies and thus getting generalizable information of the social uses of news media?
Automatic media exposure tracking
The aim of the task is to build tools for near automatic means to track media exposure of the people starting from media usage in mobile devices.
The media usage of people is currently measured by using questionnaires and diaries. Most diary solutions are implemented in old-fashioned way such as paper and pen style logs. Newer solutions also exist which bring the diaries to mobile devices such as mobile phones. However, even in these electronic diaries a user has to input the data manually into the device. In addition, information on television and radio exposure can be collected by using specialized commercial solutions.
Research questions:
  • How to automatically track the media exposure of users with as small manual intervention as possible?
  • How to automatically track simultaneous exposure of several media sources?
  • How to implement the tracking as energy efficient way as possible to guarantee good customer experience (battery usage of the mobile phones and tablets)?
  • Comparison of the automatic media exposure tracking to the traditional methods: What kind of information should be provided by the automatic media exposure tracking system for extending the traditional methods as well as possible?
Enabling Technologies and prototyping
Personal Media Hub
The objective of Personal Media Hub -task is to develop prototypes to meet users’ needs and expectations exploiting previously gained knowledge of consumers and their preferences to media usage. Prototyping may be at first at user interface-level, but until the end of the year at least partly functional prototype (including technological features) is aimed. New business models will be ideated based on users’ purchasing decisions.
Research questions
  • How to satisfy users’ needs identified in user evaluation?
  • What are the most essential analytics and how should they be applied when additional value is wanted for service users?
  • What are the new business prospects these applied analytics enable?
  • How do the solutions based on applied analytics work in practice?
  • What are the bases of consumers’ purchasing decisions regarding prototypes?
  • What are users’ attitudes, feedback and user acceptance towards new concepts and prototypes?
  • What kind(s) of business model(s) should be developed/adopted?
Semantic portable profile prototyping
Semantic portable profile prototyping (SP3) task is based on the vision of portable profiles where the user is able to create and maintain his or her profile in one place and use it in multiple services while the user is in control of what to share from the profile and where. The objective of the SP3 task is to develop methods for contextualised and predictive user profiling to create a ’killer-mix’ for providing valuable recommendations and proactive services.
Mediatutka mobile application- whose development was started in 2012 - uses semantic user profiles and provides personalized recommendations with different types of content aggregated in one application. Mediatutka provides recommendations for the user with a single click of a button and provides location-sensitive alerts in near real-time. Available content sources have been TV programs data from skimm.tv, content of Stadi.TV and new videos from Helmet library service.
Several areas need further research and development to produce unique high quality proactive contextual mobile services for consumers. One challenge is to predict users’ intentions in order to serve users at the right time with relevant content. Unlike other location based services, Mediatutka links various content sources together providing a valuable service to the user which ultimately the user is willing to pay for.
Research questions:
  • How to automatically analyse and semantically model user behaviour, life-style and situation in a way that it can be used for predicting user's needs and concrete situation and to be used as a basis for proactive services?
  • What kind of methods and content are needed for making useful proactive recommendations?
  • What kind of proactive services will be valuable to users and will create business opportunities for companies?
  • How to best utilise the potential of social media such as Facebook and Twitter in creating rich user profiles and linking web content with media content?
2nd Screen: Shaping of Social and Interactive TV Experience
The objective of the task is to experiment and study user-centric concepts and applications to personalize TV and make it more social and interactive for different program genres. The aim is to deepen the knowledge of 2nd screen user experience, to understand different user segments and their watching contexts and to continue with more detailed advertiser research to previous year. How 2nd screens such as tablets, smart phones and laptop computers could bring additional value for users during live TV watching is studied.
As enabling technologies, the developed 2nd screen concepts can deepen and expand the watching experience with social interaction and different forms of user participation. The starting point is to create easy interactions for fun and engagement for different audience segments and to study and evaluate how advertisers could get additional value of second screen uses. Similar kind of interactive services, connected with live TV, have not yet been much developed and researched in real program contexts either in Finland or internationally.
Research questions:
  • How the user interactions should be designed so that they wouldn’t disturb the watching experience but would rather offer something extra for users and deepen the experience?
  • How users experience the 2nd screen interactive TV concepts in general? Do 2nd screen concepts apply for some user segments and program genres in particular?
  • How easily users would adopt second screen interactive features? What are the reasons for adopting or not adopting the features? How in general does the use of 2nd screens during TV watching evolve? What is the relationship with the program content and the use of other devices during TV watching?
  • What kind of conceptual, methodological, demonstration/prototype level solutions should be developed for this focus area?
  • How the user experience can be improved in a multi-screening situation using a 2nd screen?
  • What are the advertiser expectations and requirements for second screen solutions provided by TV broadcasters?
  • What is the interplay between live TV broadcast and second screen content and advertising? What kind of connection should there be (if any) between TV spots, product placement, program sponsors and second screen?
  • How could second screen advertising improve the experience and engagement in TV programs and spots?
  • How to design a prototype for 2nd screen based on the guidelines for media multi-tasking applications?
  • How to develop algorithms for content recommendation and content enrichment?
  • How to evaluate and improve media experience based on bio-signals, eye-tracking and self-assessment data? How to evaluate experience based on user interactions data?

Recent Events

2014-03-21:
Next media News Bulletin Personal Media Day has been published.
2014-03-21:

Next media News Bulletin eReading has been published.
2014-03-12:
Next Media results seminar materials now published.
Next Media results seminar presentations can be found here.
2014-03-11:
Next Media result paper now published!

Next Media Makasiini is here.
2013-12-20:

Next media News Bulletin Hyperlocal has been published.