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Marcus Johnson: [00:00:00] Atmosphere TV is the largest streaming TV platform purpose-built for shared social spaces like gyms, airports, bars, and restaurants. Atmosphere TV is the creator of CHIVE TV and over 30 mesmerizing audio optional channels that entertain over 150 million monthly viewers. Built for business, made for fun, Atmosphere TV

Hey gang, it's Friday, October 30th. Paul, Jason, Eddie, and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, a new market podcast made possible by Atmosphere TV. I'm Marcus, and joining me for today's conversation we have, living just outside of Toronto, our principal analyst, Paul Briggs.

Paul Briggs: Hey, Marcus. Good to be here.

Marcus Johnson: Welcome, friends. Over in the UK in London, chief insight officer at GWI, Jason Mander.

Jason Mander: Hey, thanks for having me.

Marcus Johnson: Welcome back. And calling Chicago home head of growth planning at Starcom, Eddie Parker joins the show.

Eddie Parker: Hey, everyone.

Marcus Johnson: Hey, fella. Anytime we have special guests on, we start, of course, with a speed intro.[00:01:00]

Okay first question is to Jason and Eddie. Jason first. What does your company do, in a sentence, and what do you do for them in another one?

Jason Mander: Sure. We supply human intelligence that grounds all the decisions being made by AI in data from real people, what people around the world are actually thinking, feeling, acting, and doing.

Marcus Johnson: Terrific. And what do you do for them?

Jason Mander: I'm the chief insight officer, so I oversee all of our research, all of the millions of surveys each year that we run.

Marcus Johnson: Very good. Eddie, how about you?

Eddie Parker: I work at Starcom, which is a media planning and buying agency within Publicis Groupe, and I lead a practice here called growth planning, which is our insights and strategic planning capability.

Marcus Johnson: Excellent. Second question to everyone. We'll go Jason, Eddie, and then Paul. What's the most interesting thing you've read, watched, or listened to recently?

Jason Mander: I'm gonna go rogue and say the latest season of Slow Horses. It's still as good as it used to be.

Marcus Johnson: Why do you mean rogue? Did it come out a long time ago?

Jason Mander: No, I'm supposed to say some- Oh, recently ... amazing- It's not recently ... amazing academic thing or [00:02:00] something- Yeah ... relevant to the industry. But no, sometimes we just need to distract ourselves- ... and go back to Slow Horses.

Marcus Johnson: Very

Eddie Parker: nice. I'll go one further because I- it's Halloween season, and I, this weekend, watched the original Che- Texas Chainsaw Massacre film from 1974- Oh, yeah

which I had never seen, and it turned out to be a much more interesting and kinda thought-provoking movie than I thought it would. So it's been in my head. So if you're wondering where my mind is and has been for the last couple days, it's- Okay ... slasher and gore.

Paul Briggs: Very

Marcus Johnson: nice. How about you, Paul?

Paul Briggs: My answer is decidedly more boring.

I decided to go back and read a classic, Le- Les Miserables, Victor Hugo, but what made it interesting, it took me pretty much the whole summer to get through it but what made it interesting for me this time was a podcast companion. So I had- I would read a few chapters, and then I would listen to the podcast companion, which would walk me through or highlight some of the key takeaways from from that part of the book.

So that experience was very, was digital and was very cool.

Marcus Johnson: Interesting. I've never heard of that before. Yeah. First time doing it?

Paul Briggs: First time doing it [00:03:00] for a big piece like that. It's, Yeah ... it's a nice way to kinda break up the monotony of just reading reading. Yeah. So it was very cool.

Marcus Johnson: Okay. I've not read the book, seen the play, but that's a, yeah, interesting way to consume literature. Very nice. All right, gang. They're our three guests for today, and today's real topic, the digital lives and lifestyles of everyone in the world. We have some research out that we have out every year, and we work in collaboration with basically the three folks on the episode, all work in collaboration to put together this fantastic report.

Jason is gonna tell us a little bit about what that is and what makes this year's report unique.

Jason Mander: Yeah. So GWI runs representative research in more than 50 countries around the world, collecting responses every single day of the year, essentially asking people a wide range of questions about their digital lives and lifestyles.

So what media are they consuming? What social platforms are they hanging out on? What technologies are they [00:04:00] using? Loads of questions about brands and marketing and anything else that a marketer or advertiser would need to understand what people are actually doing and how it's changing. And every year, we get together with EMARKETER and Starcom to take stock of the data across various areas and see what's changing, and indeed, often just as importantly, what's staying the same.

And I think the reason it's so important this year is it's the first time that we have included AI in a meaningful way, so there's some great data about what people are doing, and it also gives us the latest steer on a load of very high interest topics: social short-form video, podcasts. Hopefully anything that your audience might be interested in is in that report.

Marcus Johnson: All right. Paul, do you have anything to add there? No pressure.

Paul Briggs: Yeah, for sure. I think so the, the GMI is actually a, a set of 10 reports, right? It's... There's the main report, which is an overview of the global findings, and we highlight the big stories across [00:05:00] regions in that report. But we also have country-level reports for the US, Canada, and China, and we also have six other regional reports which break out the, the sort of media behaviors of people in that region and compare it against the other regions in the world.

So if you're really looking for a deep dive into Western Europe or East Asia and Oceania, you can-- you have a dedicated report to go and check out and get the key takeaways from the findings in those regions. So that was a real robust sort of comparisons that we wanted to institute a few years ago by region, and I think it really serves the reader pretty well.

Eddie Parker: I'd just add that it's tremendously helpful for us as a media agency, one, just in terms of understanding the overall trends globally and how people are consuming media and which devices they're owning. It's helpful for certain markets, smaller markets, where a lot of media research doesn't exist, just to have any sort of view into how people are consuming different channels and device ownership, and now with the use of AI, it's really helpful to understand.

And then the third [00:06:00] way is that when we execute programs globally, a platform or creative idea that plays out across different markets, it's really helpful to know which media channels to focus on in different regions and in different countries, which ones to dial up and dial down within an idea based on consumption patterns.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. All right, so that's the research. A bunch of themes storylines that emerged from that. One of them we wanted to talk about was short form video, and you write in the research short video is gaining attention faster than any other major format. Jason, I'll start with you. What's the most interesting part of the short form video story for yourself?

Jason Mander: Ah, there's so much you could dig into. I think maybe one thing to recognize is that short-form is part of an overall social story, right? And if you add together classic or traditional social media with short-form video and long-form video, you get to a global average of about 19 hours a week, which is a colossal amount of [00:07:00] time that consumers are spending across the broad spectrum of things that would fall under social.

But within that, it is short-form video. As you can see from the chart we're now showing on the screen, short-form video has been seeing explosive growth across the world. It's grown more year on year than any other format that we report on, and we're at the precipice of it overtaking what we would call classic social media.

So classic social is polling seven hours, seven minutes this year. Short-form video, seven hours, six minutes. So by next time we are recording this, I think short-form will be the, the clear number one.

Growth across the board across pretty much every country you can look at, but interestingly, also across all age groups.

So it's not a, it's not just a young person's preserve. This is a, a, already a mainstream format that all consumers in all markets are going to.

Marcus Johnson: [00:08:00] Yeah. Of all the media that people can consume games, podcasts, stream, music streaming short-form, that seven hours, six minutes, as you said, is just in second place, will be the largest very soon, and is growing the fastest as well.

So it's not growing from a small base . It's growing from the biggest base possible across formats. Eddie, what jumps out to you about this short-form video story?

Eddie Parker: I think the fact that it was so consistent across regions. There were certain channels that were much more popular in certain- Countries or markets than others.

Streaming video was one of those, but short-term video was consistent across the board. Latin America was the highest, w- Western Europe was the lowest at about four hours. But the region that jumped out to me was East Asia which in terms of total usage of short-term video was middle of the pack at about six and a half hours.

But when you look at all the other channel usage in East Asia, it was the lowest across most of the channels: social media, video streaming, broadcast TV. So when you look at the proportion [00:09:00] of media time that short-form video accounted for in East Asia, it was 18%, which I dug in. It was the highest proportion of any channel in any region.

So it really stands out as central to media usage in East Asia, particularly China. And then that made me delve in a little bit further, and what I found is really interesting, that in China it's expanded beyond what I tend to think of as short-term video. I have a son who's on TikTok all the time, and the types of videos that he's consuming they've actually developed new formats including micro dramas.

So dramas that are one to two minutes long per episode, anywhere from 20 to 100 episodes per series, so several hours in total. You can binge watch them. They're like soap operas where there are lots of drama and revenge and romance and that sort of thing. So that could be predictive of what we see from the format and what starts to spread into other markets.

Paul Briggs: Yeah, I think it's a good ... eddie, you mentioned it, Latin America really stands out. If you look at, if you compare Latin America time spent with social video it's 37% higher than the global average, so [00:10:00] way more. But y- and then if you look at social media time spent in LatAm compared to the g- worldwide average, it's 61% more time, hours per week, hours and minutes per week on social media.

So not only is Latin America in the lead, but it's in the lead by a long shot. And if you look at the rankings for time spent with short video by country, you've got five Latin American countries that are in the top seven globally. So that would be Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Chile. All of them are demonstrating very unique consumption patterns with short video, and they're just they're consuming it a lot.

Jason Mander: I think it's interesting, right? LatAm was always ahead for social media, so it's no surprise that with the advent of short-form video, it's also the, the pioneer there. And the numbers in those countries you just mentioned, they are staggering how much time eyeballs are in front of short-form video.

The other cut I find really interesting is by age. So if you look just at 16 to 24s, golden children, Gen [00:11:00] Z, that we all care most about, it's now over 10 hours per week that those that demographic is watching short-form video. But technically, it's among boomers where short-form is growing the fastest.

So overall, much smaller amount of time, somewhere between four to five hours for boomers. But year on year, the additions they're making is where we are seeing the fastest change.

Eddie Parker: The other part of those numbers that I found really fascinating was that not only is short-term video the channel used most frequently, so the, the data is collected by asking people how many days per week they're using a certain channel, and then the duration of each session with the channel.

And I think we tend to think of short-term video and social media as smaller, snackable media formats. So not only, though, was it used most frequently, social media and short-term video had the longest duration of use of any channel. So it was 75 minutes for social media and 74 minutes right behind it for short-form video, which was longer than streaming video, which was only 65 [00:12:00] minutes, and broadcast TV, which is only 54 minutes.

So really counterintuitive in terms of my perception of how those channels are being used, and I think it speaks to a greater opportunity where people are really more engrossed in short-term videos and potentially paying attention to ads- ... through longer sessions.

Marcus Johnson: All right, gents. Let's move on to another theme i- in the research, which is AI, people will be shocked to learn.

Paul, what did the report tell us about how different people around the world are using artificial intelligence?

Paul Briggs: So there was a, a question to the, for tho- for those in the poll, basically looking at different use cases of AI in their in their regular patterns. As you can see on the screen, we've just popped up a chart from the report looking at the top use cases and the degree of penetration for each of those use cases, including finding information, advice, learning skills.

So this is a really good way to understand which use cases are more popular, and we also have in this chart the top region for each of those use cases. So it's a real high-level overview, but it gives you a good idea of how the regions differ. What I basically took away was a [00:13:00] lot of the higher adopted use cases fell within the realm of AI search.

And at EMARKETER, we do a ton of research and forecasting around that behavior, how search is evolving from traditional search into AI-assisted search or pure AI search. So lots of people using it, and I think this data like finding information, is the number one use case worldwide. It kinda reinforces what we've been seeing for the last couple years.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. We also have what we call the building blocks of AI adoption that Nate Elliott, our principal analyst covering AI at EMARKETER put together, and the, it seems to stack up quite similarly in terms of what people in the US are doing and what people around the world are doing. The number one activity according to Nate's report was asking for information.

That was 51% similar to finding information i, i- in the the rankings of what people around the world are doing. And then second one was doing, [00:14:00] 34%. That was things like asking for personal advice, guidance, tasks, and advice was the second thing on the list. So it seemed to line up quite well, at least at the top.

Jason, what jumped out to you about the AI use around the world?

Jason Mander: Yeah, a couple of things really. One is if you split by age, the older generations are so much further ahead than you might assume them to be. If you were to look back at social media adoption or smartphone adoption, by this time for those technologies, you'd still see boomers quite a long way behind, and even Gen X a fair distance off the youngest generations.

But look at AI adoption and your boomer cohort is really active. Over 75% are using AI for something, and there are countries out there where the 55 to 60 co- 65 ... 55 to 64 cohort, over 90% of them are using AI for something. So-

Paul Briggs: Wow ...

Jason Mander: anyone out there who thinks that AI is a young person's game, a, a Gen Z or a millennial thing, think [00:15:00] again, because the adoption curve has been so much faster than a l- a lot of people assume.

Yeah. The other thing

Marcus Johnson: to- I wonder, I won- really quickly, I wonder why. That is it ... what's the, the chief reason? 'Cause there's a bunch of reasons you could think of, but, like, why with this technology specifically?

Jason Mander: D- I, I guess from my perspective, because it's so freely and readily available and has had so much hype.

It, with a smartphone you had to go out and purchase one. Yeah. But for AI, you just open whatever your device of choice is and you get- There it is ... get going.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. Yeah.

Eddie Parker: Oh, sorry. Yeah, I was struck by, I was struck by just how universally high the overall AI usage numbers were across the board in every market.

And some of the ones that were- Lagging were surprising to me. Japan was the lowest penetration country at 62%. From a region perspective- ... North America and Western Europe were the lowest at 79 or 80%. So markets that I would have thought were more developed or more technologically advanced were actually lagging, and it was the [00:16:00] other markets that were, like you said, up above 90%.

And I noticed what you said about age, too, because the, what distinguished the countries that were ahead or behind tended to be the older age groups. So in the markets where, there was the highest adoption overall, it was because younger consumers and older consumers alike were using it up above 90%, like you said.

And in markets like the US and Japan, there was actually a bigger distinction between younger and older.

Paul Briggs: Yeah, and h- and here, too, I think Latin America stands out here as well in terms of how they use AI. So less for search-related tasks and more for creative things like writing content or creating images or videos.

So Latin America leads the world there for that sort of more creative application of using AI.

Marcus Johnson: Okay.

Jason Mander: J- what I think is really interesting is the top in, the top use case that we talked about, searching for information, it's not just top for 16 to 24s and 55 to 64s, it's scoring similar percentages.

So [00:17:00] around about 50% of both those age groups are using it. It's in the other cases where you start to see the age discrimination. So things that lean a bit more creative 16 to 24s are well ahead of the older age groups. But the two countries that really stood out for me were the UAE and Israel, where over 90% of 55 to 64s are engaging with AI.

Yeah. So that re- really is one to challenge your preconceptions, I'd say.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. Jason, did you have a second point that I interrupted, or was that what you were gonna say?

Jason Mander: I did have a second point, actually. Yeah. Which was I also think it's really interesting, and it's a massive opportunity that's opening up, that AI is already a default or natural go-to for searching for information, but people haven't quite yet thought about it in a commercial purchasing context.

So ask people where they go to find information, AI is up there. Ask people where they go to start a search for a product, and you'd still see far stronger figures [00:18:00] polling for things like search engines. So- AI is winning the sort of battle to be considered an information provider. There's still some ground to cover for it to be seen as doing that within a I need to purchase something, Yeah

context. But

Eddie Parker: the physics are- We are finding for a number of our clients that AI has become a priority for them and an important source for consumers to at least seek information about their purchases, and for certain product categories it can be important. And I think more than that, our clients are asking about it a lot and wanting to get ahead of the trend for when it does become a stronger source of product decisions.

What I think is really interesting about that, so that, that puts the focus not only on driving consumer persuasion for us, but also driving recommendations from AI chatbots and having our products come to the top. The good thing, and the really interesting thing, is that it's this circular process where if you look at where AI sources its information, it's from places like Reddit, which in the US Reddit is the number one [00:19:00] source for for LLMs to source data, Facebook and other social media.

So it highlights the importance of earned and shared media, not just from its own value in driving consumer persuasion through word of mouth, but because that's where the AI services are sourcing their recommendations, so it comes back around in that way too. So- Yeah ... it's really got us focused on like a full PESO media plan, we call it, paid, earned, shared, and owned, but specifically the earned and shared have that sort of double value of also fueling the LLMs.

Marcus Johnson: Jason, to your point, the, in the US as well, asking, like I said, 51% of people are asking GenAI a question to get information. But shopping is a long way behind with 16%, and so there is a chasm between those two activities, even though they are both looking for... Now, sometimes it's making the purchase, but a lot of times shopping means looking for the thing.

Anything from anyone else in terms of AI and, Paul, anything to add in terms of it, the stories that jumped out to you? On the AI side, or was it mainly the Latin America thing? [00:20:00]

Paul Briggs: Yeah, the Latin American thing. Okay. And one other thing I'd say is if you look at Western Europe and North America, it's

Th- they lead typically in what we've been talking about in terms of AI search, sort of text-based, and then lag a bit in the- ... more creative applications of AI. That was another sort of counterpoint to what we're seeing in Latin America.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. All right, gents, let's end the episode by going around the horn and discussing the most surprising story that you uncovered in the report.

Eddie, I'll start with you.

Eddie Parker: Yeah, I thought it was surprising looking overall at the report the ... I mentioned this when we were talking about AI, but the markets that I think of as the most developed and the most technologically advanced, and then I would assume would see the highest rates of usage for digital media, social, short-form video, streaming, actually tended to be the most heavy users of broadcast media and traditional radio and traditional print.

And it was the less developed markets that were lower in those traditional media and often farther ahead [00:21:00] in digital media. And it makes sense when you think about it. I guess you need an infrastructure in place to have broadcast TV and broadcast radio, and it really crystallized that digital media is an equalizer, and the barrier to entry is low.

You just need an internet connection, and then all of this content and all of these channels are opened up everywhere in the gr- world, and that sort of shifted my thinking there a little bit.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. Paul, most surprising story for you?

Paul Briggs: I think I, I was looking at the rankings in terms of where countries rank compared to the other sort of 50 countries that are in the mix.

And the one thing that stood out to me was Philippines. Philippines is the number one ranked country for eight separate categories of device ownership, time spent, and media adoption. Wow. So including video, influencer videos, social media adoption, on-demand streaming, time spent. So it was just really stood out that country is leading a lot of other peer countries in their region, but also around the globe.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah, very nice. Jason, bring us home.

Jason Mander: I'm gonna cheat and go with [00:22:00] two, but they build on both the points- We'll take it ... that Eddie and Paul just made. The first is that Gen Z in North America are less engaged with AI than any other region. You would I think many of us- Wow ... would assume North America's at the forefront, but actually every other region, pretty much every other market polls above North America for 16 to 24s on AI, which, you know, so this sort of immediately challenges your thinking.

The other one, to build on what Paul was saying about the Philippines, in the Philippines, time spent on social media is four times higher than it is in China. And there are lots of other examples that would show you those huge differences in time spent to a, a particular activity. So it's a reminder that your planning does need to be regional because if you make assumptions about what a region is doing, you will miss those huge deltas between countries that are geographically not that far from each other.

Marcus Johnson: Yeah. All right, time for our key takeaways. Three [00:23:00] here, I think. Age and country differences remain profound. When running global campaigns, you need to make sure that they are targeted, are very targeted to to not miss regional nuances. Number two, short-form video is the fastest growing format year over year up over 5%, despite growing from such a large, one of the largest bases now over seven hours a week second only to traditional social media, so to speak.

And number three, there are more and more use cases for AI, with 86% of users having used AI for at least one in the past month. The full report is called the Global Media Intelligence Report 2026. It just dropped yesterday full of recommendations for media buyers. Link is of course in the show notes, or Pro Pass subscribers can head straight to EMARKETER.com.

That is all we have time for today's episode. Thank you so much to my guests. Thank you to Paul.

Paul Briggs: Thanks, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson: And to Jason.

Jason Mander: Pleasure as always.

Marcus Johnson: And of course to Eddie.

Jason Mander: Thanks for having me.

Marcus Johnson: And thank you to the production crew, John and Lance helping us out with this one. And thanks to everyone for listening in to find the Marketing Marketer [00:24:00] podcast, made possible by Atmosphere TV.

We'll be back on Monday discussing the three big questions for Netflix, but until then, happiest of Halloween weekends.