Public Affairs 2.0

Bathing in the afterglow of beating a particularly poor Germany with our reserve team at football last night, the FT’s UK section continues the gloating with the headline “Internet Savvy Britons lead digital league“.

Apparently the UK regulator Ofcom has unveiled its latest piece of research into the UK communications landscape. Thankfully, it contrasts the UK not only with our poor German cousins but also with Italy and France as well as Canada, the US and Japan amongst others. It also gives a good compendium of graphs and tables on a wide range of questions affecting the communications landscape from the penetration of mobile TV (Italy wins) to how likely we are to be part of a social media network (UK wins in Europe).

I am still rather shocked at that internet advertising spend is so low in comparision with other media in some countries (3%  of total in Italy, 4% in Germany and 5% in France). Given that the same survey suggests the French spend 13 hours a week online, I presume we are in a similar situation to this US graphic from 2007 in Europe in terms of ad spend versus time spend in each medium.

The rather weighty report includes some interesting graphs and stats for anyone trying to prove the relative importance of the internet in the greater scheme of things from Ofcom original fieldwork as well as recent work by others such as Neilsen. Worth a look.

James