The Blurring Between Work And Play

Emap Advertising’s Richard Fero looks at the blurring between work and leisure time, and what this could spell for advertisers…

The marketing industry today views consumers as being ‘time poor’. Media headlines tell us people in the UK work the longest hours in Europe, are under more pressure in their lives, and increasingly suffer from stress as a result.

At Emap Advertising we utilised our 10,000 strong insight panel, The Inside, to look at whether these assumptions are accurate. Background research into the wealth of government data available showed us that the idea all consumers are working increasingly harder and longer isn’t necessarily supported by the evidence available. Data from the Labour Market Trends survey conducted by the ONS reveals the proportion of the UK’s full-time labour force working more than 45 hours a week is, if anything, in decline. Trend data from the Future Foundation suggests that while a majority of people (55%) say they are “often under time pressure” in their everyday lives, the proportion of people who fit this description hasn’t grown in the last decade.

Yet there is clearly something in the dynamic between people’s working lives and their leisure time that is worth exploring. We found consumers, particularly in high status jobs, were telling us they found it hard to ‘switch off’. Today’s workers are always contactable and can easily work from home; meaning work life doesn’t necessarily end when they leave the office. Over half our respondents (52%) still think about work even when they aren’t there (over 60% for AB adults), with a significant minority (38%) saying they work from home on their days off (50% for AB adults).

There has been much discussion in the press recently about the effect of Blackberry devices on people’s working lives and our data supports the belief that these new technologies are indeed making a difference. Even when just looking at people in higher status jobs, we found workers with these devices are significantly more likely to work on their days off, or outside of normal working hours (67% for those with PDAs v 38% for those without). Clearly a blurring between people’s work time and leisure time is taking place.

There is another side to these changes. According to TGI, nearly half (45%) of full-time workers access the internet at work, with broadband technologies giving workers a wealth of entertainment at their fingertips. We looked into how prevalent the ‘Facebook’ effect is – are people really using work-time to do things they shouldn’t? Our findings show this phenomenon is just as bad as employers have feared. 42% of those with internet access at work use it for non-work purposes a minimum of several times a day, with a hardcore of 8% saying they are on it all the time.

While lunchtime is unsurprisingly the peak period, we found that when aggregated, more people access the internet for non-work purposes during work time (65% of those who have internet access at work), than access it when they are ‘allowed’ to do so at lunchtime (61%). The data shows the ‘work-play’ blurring works both ways, with more people working while they should be having fun and having fun when they should be working.

So what does this mean, and what are the implications for advertisers? The evidence suggests technology is changing how we view our time. We used to think of people’s time in ‘blocks’ – they are at work at this time, they are at home at that time, they do this here, they do that there. This is clearly no longer the case; the ‘blurring’ we are seeing is real and has immediate implications:

TARGETING – when thinking about consumers, particularly the more affluent who have access to these time-blurring technologies, don’t just think about targeting them at the traditional times, in the traditional places.

QUESTION THE EASY CONSUMER ASSUMPTIONS – although we frequently talk about consumers as time-pressured, they aren’t more so than before – these clichés need questioning.

CONSUMERS STILL HAVE TIME FOR YOUR BRAND – If evidence suggests consumers aren’t more time-pressured than before, the possibility is still there for consumers to make time for your brand, what brands have to consider (as always) is how to provide an experience that makes this worthwhile.