Ampers & Dot

According to a pretty awesome study performed by Scarborough Research for its “Understanding the Digital Savvy Consumer” paper (Extreme PDF Warning!) six percent of the US defined as “Digital Savvy”. And yes, I did just describe a quantitative study as “awesome”. That’s so unlike me, normally I only attribute such traits to qualitative research.

And now that the stupid joke is out of the way, let’s talk about the research. Fundamentally the researchers questioned thousands of people to determine their tech use and depending on how geeky the answers turned out, each person was assigned a level of “Digital Savvy”.

First, let’s run through the items that determine geekiness.

Do you own

• PDA
• Digital Video Recorder
• Satellite Radio Subscription
• VoIP
• Mp3 Player
• HDTV

How do you use the internet?

• Online banking
• Reading/contributing to blogs
• Games
• Podcasts
• Music
• Video
• IM

How do you use your cell phone?

• Download ringtones/games
• Email
• Text
• Video
• Other internet

Anyway, the research gets really interesting by comparing other traits between the “Digital Savvy” and general US. To simplify things from now on we’ll deem these terms “techno-awesome” and “weirdo-neo-luddites”. Ok, this might be too tricky… let’s just go with “Digital Savvy” and “General Consumer”.

It turns out that the digital savvy consumer is, unsurprisingly, more likely to be: a wealthy, upperclass, white collar, college graduate. I probably could have told you this.

But what I did find surprising was a few strange traits attributed to the digital savvy consumer.

For example: the digital savvy consumer is about twice as likely to have a broadband internet connection than the general consumer. This makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that 3% of digital savvy consumers have NO internet connection.

Another one that confused me: the digital savvy consumer is about 18% more likely to be an NFL fan and nearly 50% more likely to be an NHL fan. This has to be wrong. (Although I think it’s great that the digital savvy is about twice as likely to be a soccer fan!)

Here’s another confusing one: 6% of digital savvy respondents spent less than $100 online last year. Have they never even heard of the SomethingStore?

Finally, according to page 42 the digital savvy consumer is almost twice as likely to visit ESPN than Google. Bull. Shit. Now I love The Sports Guy as much as anyone, but to get the link I just included- I found it through Google, not my bookmark.

And now to explain my confusion over all of these findings: I’m extremely biased.

Personally, I score a whopping 94% (I don’t understand the value of satellite radio, but aced the rest of this puppy) on the test above, would likely put me more on the “overwhelmingly geeky” end of the “digital savvy” scale (which according to slide 66 is only .1% of the US). I’m so far removed from the general consumer that I’ve lost touch with reality, apparently.

But still, how can you be digitally savvy and not have internet connection? And no matter what, I can’t believe that a vast majority of the digitally savvy are such huge sports fans. And there is no way in hell that one in six of all digital savvy Americans live in Texas! I call this research debunked. DEBUNKED!