The Digital Lives and Lifestyles of Everyone in the World: Short-Form Video Surges, AI Use Cases, and More | Behind the Numbers

Speaker A: 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 New Market podcast made possible by Atmosphere tv. I'm Marcus and join me for today's conversation. We have, living just outside of Toronto, our principal analyst, Paul Briggs.

Speaker B: Hey, Marcus. Good to be here.

Speaker A: Welcome, friends over in the uk In London, Chief Insight Officer at gwi, Jason Mander. Hey, thanks for having me. Welcome back. And calling Chicago home, uh, Head of Growth Planning at Starcom, Eddie Parker joins the show. Hey, everyone. Hey, fella. Um, anytime we have special guests on, we start, of course, with a speed intro. Okay. Uh, 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?

Speaker C: Sure. So, uh, 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

Speaker A: terrific. And what do you do for them?

Speaker C: Uh, I'm the Chief Insight Officer, so I oversee all of our research, all of the millions of surveys each year that we run. Done.

Speaker A: Very good. Eddie, how about you?

Speaker D: Um, I work at Starcom, which is a media planning and buying agency within Publicis Group. And I lead a practice here called Growth Planning, which is our insights and strategic planning capability.

Speaker A: 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?

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

Speaker A: Why do you mean rogue? Did it come out a long time ago?

Speaker C: No, I'm supposed to say some

Speaker A: amazing,

Speaker C: amazing academic thing or something relevant to the industry, but no. Sometimes we just need to distract ourselves. Go back to Slow Horses.

Speaker A: I'll

Speaker D: go one further because I. It's Halloween season and I this weekend watched the original Texas Chainsaw massacre film from 1974, which I had never seen, and it turned out to be a much more interesting and kind of 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 slasher and gore.

Speaker A: Very nice. How about you Paul?

Speaker B: Well, my answer is decidedly more boring. I decided to go back and read a classic, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo. But what made it interesting, it took me pretty much the whole summer to get through it. Um, 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, uh, from that part of the book. So that experience was very, was digital and was very cool.

Speaker A: Interesting. I've never heard of that before. First time doing it.

Speaker B: First time doing it for, if, for a big piece like that. It's uh, it's a nice way to kind of break up the monotony of just reading, reading, reading. Yeah, it was, it was very cool.

Speaker A: Okay, I've not read the book, seen the Play, but that's an interesting way to consume, um, the literature. Very nice. All right, gang. Well, there are three guests for today, and today's real topic, the digital lives and lifestyles of everyone in, in the world. Uh, we have, uh, some research out, uh, that we have out every year and we work in collaboration, um, with uh, basically the three folks on the uh, episode all work in collaboration to put together this fantastic uh, report. Jason is going to tell us a little bit about um, what that is and what makes this year's report unique.

Speaker C: 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 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, uh, across various areas, um, 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, uh, short form video podcasts. Hopefully anything that your audience might be interested in is in that report.

Speaker A: Uh, all right, Paul, do you have anything to add there? No pressure.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure, I think. Um, so the GMI is actually a set of 10 reports. Right. There's the main report, which is an overview of the global findings and we highlight the big stories across regions in that report. But we also have, um, country level reports for the U.S. canada and China. And we also have six, um, other regional reports which break out 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, from the, from the findings in those regions. So that was, that was a real robust sort of comparisons that we wanted to institute a few years ago by region. And I think, um, it really serves the reader pretty well.

Speaker D: I 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. Um, 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, um, and then the third way is that, uh, when we execute programs globally, a platform or creative idea that plays out across different markets, it's really helpful to know how to, 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.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, all right, so that's the research, a bunch of themes, uh, storylines, uh, that emerge from that. One of them we wanted to talk about was short, uh, 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, uh, part of the short form video story, uh, for yourself?

Speaker C: 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 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 um, format, uh, that we um, report on and we're at the precipice of it overtaking what we would call classic social media. So classic Social is polling 7 hours 7 minutes this year. Short form video, 7 hours 6 minutes. So by next time we are recording, 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, already a mainstream um, format that all consumers in all markets are going to.

Speaker A: Yeah, of all the media that people can consume, um, games, podcasts, street music, streaming, uh, short form, that 7 hours 6 minutes as you said, is just in second place, will be the largest, uh, very soon and is growing the fastest as well. So it's not growing from a small base, is growing from the biggest base possible across formats. Eddie, what jumps out to you about this short form video story?

Speaker D: 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. Um, streaming video was one of those. But short term video was consistent across the board. Latin America was the highest, Western Europe was the lowest at about four hours. But the region that jumped out to me was East Asia, um, which in terms of total usage of short term video was kind of 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 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. Um, and then that made me delve in a little bit further and what I found is really interesting that in China, um, 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, um, they've actually developed new formats, uh, 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 kind of like soap operas where there are lots of drama and revenge and romance and that sort of thing. So it could be predictive of what we see from the format and what starts to spread into other markets.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a good, like Eddie, you mentioned it, Latin America really stands out. Like if you look at, if you compare Latin America time spent with social video, um, it's like 37% higher than the global average. So way more. Um, but, and then if you look at social media time spent in Latam compared to the worldwide average, it's 61% more, you know, time, you know, 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. Um, 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. Um, all of them are demonstrating very unique consumption patterns with short video. And they're just, they're, they're consuming it a lot.

Speaker C: I think it's interesting, right? Um, latam was always ahead for social media. So it's no surprise that with the advent of short form video, it's also the pioneer there, there. And m, the numbers you, you see in those countries you just mentioned, they are staggering, uh, 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 16-24s golden children, Gen Z that we all care most about, it's now over 10 hours um, per week that those um, that that demographic is watching, um, 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, uh, change.

Speaker A: M

Speaker D: the other part of those numbers that I found really fascinating was that um, not only is short term video the channel used most frequently, so that 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 kind of 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 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, um, through longer sessions.

Speaker A: All right gents, let's move on to another theme in the research which is um, AI people will be shocked to learn. Uh, Paul, what did the report tell us about how different people around the world are using artificial intelligence?

Speaker B: Right, so there was a question to uh, the, for the, 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 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, how the regions differ. What I basically took away was a lot of the higher adopted use cases kind of 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, um, finding Information is the number one use case worldwide. It kind of reinforces what we've been seeing for the last couple of years.

Speaker A: Yeah, we also have what we call the building blocks, um, of AI adoption that Nate Elliot, our, uh, principal analyst covering AI, um, the market put together and it seems to stack up quite, uh, similarly in terms of what people in the US are doing and what people around the world doing. Uh, the number one, uh, activity according uh, to Nate's report was asking for information. Uh, that was 51%, um, similar to finding information in um, the rankings of what people around the world are doing. Uh, and then second, uh, one was uh, doing 34%. That was things like asking for personal advice, guidance tasks and advice was the second thing on the list. Ah. 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?

Speaker C: Yeah, a couple of things really. One is, um, if you split by age, the older generations are so much further ahead than you might assume them to be. Um, if you were to look back at social media adoption or smartphone adoption by this time for those technologies, you'd still see, boom is 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, really active. Over 75% are, uh, using AI for something. And you know, 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,

Speaker B: wow,

Speaker C: anyone out there who thinks that AI is a young person's game, uh, a Gen Z or a millennial thing, think again. Because the adoption curve has been so much faster than a lot of people, um, assume

Speaker A: the

Speaker C: other thing

Speaker A: I want really quickly. I wonder why that is it? Like, what's the chief reason? Because there's a bunch of reasons you could think of, but, like, why with this technology specifically?

Speaker C: I guess from my perspective, because it's so freely and readily available and has had so much hype, you know, with a smartphone you had to go out and purchase one. But for AI, you just open whatever your device of choice is and you get going.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker D: 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. It's like 79 or 80%. So markets that I would have thought were more developed or more technologically advanced were actually lagging. And it was the other markets that were, like you said, up above 90%. And I noticed what you said about age too, because what distinguished the countries that were ahead or behind tended to be the older age group. 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.

Speaker B: And here too, I think Latin America stands out here as well, um, in terms of how they use AI 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.

Speaker A: Okay,

Speaker C: what I think is really interesting is that the top use case that we talked about, searching for information, it's not just top for, uh, 16-24s and 55-64s, it's scoring similar percentages. So, uh, around about 50% of both those age groups are used using it. It's in the other cases where you start to see the age discrimination, so things that lean a bit more creative, um, 16-24s are well ahead of of the older age groups. But, um, the two countries that really stood out for me were the UAE and Israel, where over 90% of 55-64s are engaging with, um, AI. So that really is one to challenge your preconceptions, I'd say.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Jason, did you have a second point that I interrupted or was that what you were going to say?

Speaker C: Um, I did have a second point actually, which was, um, I also think it's really interesting and it's a massive opportunity that's um, 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 polling for things like search engines. So AI is winning the sort of battle to be considered an information provider. Uh, there's still some ground to cover for it to be seen as uh, doing that within a I need to purchase something, um, context. But

Speaker D: we are

Speaker C: finding for

Speaker D: 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, um, 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, um, source of product decisions. What I think is really interesting about that, so that puts the focus not only on driving consumer persuasion for us, but also driving recommendations from AI chatbots and having our products, uh, come to the top. The good thing, and the really interesting thing is that it's sort of 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 source for um, for uh, 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 and 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 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

Speaker A: um, Jason, to your point, in the US as well, asking, like I said, 51% of people asking, um, Gen AI a question to get information. But shopping, uh, is a long way behind with 16%. And so there is a chasm, uh, between those two activities, even though they are both looking for. Sometimes it's making the purchase, but a lot of times shopping means looking for the thing, um, anything from anyone else in terms of AI. And Paul, anything to add in terms of other stories that jumped out to you on the AI side? Or was it maybe Latin America thing?

Speaker B: Yeah, the Latin American thing. And one other thing I'd say is like if you look at Western Europe and North America, they lead typically in what we've been talking about in terms of AI, sort of text based and sort of lag a bit in the more creative applications of AI. Um, that was another sort of counterpoint to what we're seeing in Latin America.

Speaker A: Um, 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. Um, Eddie, I'll start with you.

Speaker D: Yeah, I thought it was surprising looking overall at the report. 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. Uh, and it was the less developed markets that were lower in those traditional media and often farther ahead in digital media. Um, 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, uh, 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 world. And that sort of shifted my thinking there a little bit.

Speaker A: Yeah. Paul, most surprising story for you.

Speaker B: I think I was looking at the rankings in terms of where countries rank compared to the other sort of 50 countries that are, 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. So including video influencer videos, uh, social media adoption, on demand, streaming, time spent. So it was just really stood out that that country is leading a lot of other peer countries in their, in their region, but also around the globe.

Speaker A: Yeah, very nice. Jason, bring us home.

Speaker C: I'm going to cheat and go with two. But they build on both the points that Eddie and Paul, uh, just made. Um, the first is that, uh, Gen Z and North America are less engaged with AI than any other region you would like. I think many of us would assume North America is at the forefront. Actually every other region, pretty much every other market polls above North America for 16-24s on AI, which, you know, so sort of immediately challenges your thinking. The other one, to build on what Paul was saying about the Philippines. In, um, 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, um, differences in time spent to it a particular activity. So it's a reminder that your planning does need to be regional, um, 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.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. All right, time for our key takeaways. Uh, three here. I think age and country differences remain profound when, uh, running global campaigns. You need to make sure that they are targeted, very targeted, to not miss regional nuances. Number two, short form video is the fastest growing format, uh, year over year up over 5% despite growing from such a large, one of the largest bases. Ah, now over seven hours a week, um, 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 uh 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 plus subscribers can head straight to eMarketer.com that is all we have time for for today's episode. Thank you so much to my guests. Thank you to Paul.

Speaker B: Thanks Marcus.

Speaker A: And to Jason.

Speaker C: Pleasure as always.

Speaker A: Of course to Eddie.

Speaker D: Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: And thank you to the production crew, John and Lance, helping us out with this one. And thanks to everyone for listening to behind the Numbers. Marketer podcast may be 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.