Last week,
eMarketer approached Lura Hobbs – President of our sister agency,
LimeGreen Moroch – for her thoughts on why black consumers in the US skew higher than other consumers for time spent on their smartphones. According to a recent
Nielsen study, the amount of time black consumers in the US spent using apps or the web on a smartphone in an average week grew by 48% between Q2 2015 and Q2 2016, to 12 hours and 27 minutes. In Q2 2016 alone, black consumers outpaced the US average by 46 minutes per week.
Additionally, Nielsen found that in May 2016, black US adults visited an average of 46.9 sites from their smartphone and used an average of 31.5 smartphone apps. Comparatively, total US adults visited 43.8 sites via their smartphones and accessed 27.6 smartphone apps.
However, these statistics did not come as a shock to Lura who said:
“African Americans are mobile first in everything they do. Smart phones are their primary device for making purchases and conducting business. A primary reason for this is because they skew younger and have a more connected mentality. The average age of the African American consumer is 31 while the average age for the General Consumer is 39. It’s been proven that the millennial consumer – especially an African American millennial consumer – is always on the go, therefore mobile must be the primary vehicle for developing brand experiences for that audience. Mobile is where they live and where many marketers fall short is believing mobile is strictly for social use when it’s most definitely not. They concentrate on building brand experiences online but don’t optimize it for mobile. They sink their primary digital media spend in desktop display but not in mobile ads. Simply put, brands will lose money if they don’t put mobile first when targeting African Americans.”
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