Forgive us while we fact-check the Odyssey, but someone has to. Despite Matt Damon’s heroics, Greek consumers are in fact less likely to describe themselves as adventurous. Coming in above-average for preferring spa retreats and beach holidays, most of them would prefer to stay in Calypso’s clutches just a little bit longer…
Scroll down to read about El Niño, bums on seats, and hair shirts.
Stats to power your week
😶We’re a lot more shy online these days. A third of consumers used the internet to share their opinion in 2018, but eight years on, it’s now down to a quarter. Whether it’s because we know how permanent posts are, or we’ve moved to group chats and DMs, fewer of us are using the web to speak our minds. GWI Core (US/UK)
🌀El Niño, the Pacific weather pattern that pushes up global temperatures, has officially begun, and it looks like a big one. 14% report being very concerned about it, about the same as the level of concern about hantavirus back in May (remember that?). A bonus curious fact about El Niño - even though the term is Spanish, Hispanic Americans are less likely to have heard of it. GWI Pulse
🎞️Christopher Nolan’s use of IMAX for “The Odyssey” suggests spectacle is the way to get people back into cinemas, but what consumers want goes beyond just the screen. Joint-top of the list of most important factors of the cinema experience to consumers are sound/picture quality but also comfort of seating (both 63%). The way to get bums on seats might be to think about bums on seats. GWI Pulse
🦠Ask someone where to go viral and they’ll most likely say TikTok or Instagram. But YouTube might be underpriced - in a recent survey we did about viral drink trends (refreshers, matchas, etc.), YouTube actually came out as the biggest source of discovery (26%). And not just that - both it and Instagram came out ahead of old-fashioned word of mouth (22%). GWI Pulse
Meet the audience: Political activists
Without GWI data
With GWI data
The UK has just welcomed its 7th Prime Minister in the last 10 years, and alongside that turnover a whole field of politics podcasts has emerged. There are now so many that one of them is actually called “Not Another One”.
It’s easy to assume that the typical listener is a classic political activist; young and male (with more energy to devote to social causes) for whom politics is a defining aspect of their identity. But politics is less influential in their life than we might expect, and in general, their profile is much “calmer” than the activist stereotype.
It’s right to think that politics podcast listeners are more likely to be male, but they skew older, and more affluent than you might expect (no hair shirts here). With over-indexes for interest in business and finance, it’s reasonable to suggest they’re receptive to the right kind of advertising and that they may, in fact, not be complete anti-capitalists.
Chart of the week
We tend to track consumer concerns when they’re increasing and not fading, but both sides of the story matter. Immigration was one of the defining anxieties of the last election cycle, but concern has since fallen back sharply under the new administration.
That decline lines up with observations at the southern border, where illegal border crossings have dropped to their lowest level since 1970. At the same time, Americans have become more positive about immigration itself.
That seems odd at first glance, especially if you assume immigration is being driven down by people getting more set against it. But to many the debate isn’t about immigration itself, but whether governments can provide order and control. When the system feels overwhelmed, immigration becomes a proxy for disorder. When the pressure eases, the underlying view of immigration becomes more favourable again.
More from GWI
Dani Mariano, CEO of Razorfish, joined us on our podcast at Cannes for a fascinating talk on AI and creativity - check it out here.
AI has opened the doors to self-serve data, but self-service needs guardrails, as you’ll discover in our upcoming webinar.
