Pandemic-Driven Changes Are Here to Stay

Coming out of the pandemic, one of the major challenges for marketers has been understanding changes in consumer behavior, with many diversifying channels to accommodate shifts in behavior. Within major media, some changes in consumption patterns among audiences appear to be stabilizing after undergone some transitions during the pandemic, while others are slowly reverting to past trends, according to MarketingCharts’ 10th annual Media Audience Demographics report.

With the exception of print newspaper readership – which plummeted from 2022 to 2023 – there have been only modest changes in weekly media reach among US adults, according to the study. Legacy media continue to dip, but only slightly, while the results are more mixed with digital media, with audio showing minor gains but video a slight step back.

The composition of some of these media’s audiences appears to be solidifying after earlier changes. For example, during the pandemic, adults ages 65+ grew much closer to the national adult average in their propensity to use social media. While being 45% less likely than the average adult to use social media in early 2020, they’ve now been around 27-28% less likely over the past couple of years, suggesting that their move to social media is being cemented.

Another change that was observed in the early days of the pandemic was a greater likelihood for lower-income households to watch downloaded or streaming TV. While they grew closer to the average in their likelihood to do so on a weekly basis between 2020 and 2021, they’ve remained static since as this change as eased off.

However, in other cases, some shifts seen during the pandemic have begun to recede:

• Traditional TV’s trend towards a graying audience was halted during the pandemic, as linear TV enjoyed a slight bounce-back. However, over the past couple of years, this trend has restarted, as younger viewers are deserting traditional TV. In this latest study, 18-24-year-olds were 26% less likely than the average adult to watch traditional TV during an average week, after being 18% less likely the year prior.
• Print magazines’ Black adult audience fell off during the pandemic, but has since been recovering. Whereas non-Hispanic Black adults were 9% less likely than average to read print magazines during the average week in 2021, that rose to a 5% below-average likelihood in 2022, and reached an index figure of 100 (exactly average) last year.