When it comes to media usage behavior, the following applies: Don't make assumptions about others

What do you think, do people from the marketing and media industry, so-called Ad People (to which the author of this article also belongs), have a different media usage behavior than the rest of the Swiss population? If so, do the ad people therefore even misjudge general usage behavior? We wanted to know exactly and, together with the IGEM and in cooperation with the WEMF, conducted the "Media Bias" study on the media usage of ad people and their assessment of general media usage behavior (study available for download at the bottom of the article).

But before we go into the study results, we would like to test your estimation accuracy on general media usage here. To do so, first answer the question for yourself and then click on the respective video:

The opposite picture emerges for newer media (chart 2). You may have felt the same way about your estimate above, but the ad people in the study overestimated general social media usage in virtually all cases. For TikTok, it's 19 percentage points (about 1 million users); for Instagram, 15 percentage points (1 million); and for LinkedIn, 9 percentage points (about 600,000). Particularly striking here: Ad People not only overestimate the general use of Facebook and Co. but also use these offerings significantly more than the general population.

Now, you could say, "So what if the professionals are a little off the mark with their assessment. You could, but you shouldn't. Because this "wrong" assessment may lead to unfavorable decisions in media planning. And that is precisely the reason why we conducted this study. The results underline once again that it is worthwhile to conduct media usage research and to use the data for marketing decisions.