Even before COVID-19, media was in a state of flux. There was growing recognition of “the atten-tion economy” whereby providers increasingly realized they were all in competition for consumers’ time, and not just with their peers. 

In this report we’ve put the numbers to these recent developments, to figure out how consumers spend their time, and how their atten-tion can be gained, retained, and monetized.

The report is written with media planners in mind, but we anticipate the insights within will also be val-uable to anyone seeking guidance on changing media habits during a pandemic. We have broken down many of our over-time charts into halves and quarters, to best see how 2020 developed, and to help see which lockdown behaviors will revert, and which will sustain. 

To identify future trends, we look for clues in three places: in changes over time, in younger age groups, and in markets where rapid digital adop-tion can herald wider changes (for an example, look no further than TikTok).