Insights

"To say 2020 has been one of volatility, uncertainty and caution among consumers as well as small and big businesses would be an understatement of epic proportion.
COVID-19, cultural and civil unrest and continued evolution in the media landscape have altered all aspects of our everyday lives. The way we shop for groceries, receive medical care— even how we see each other—have all been upended. Many changes won’t be temporary, and this disruption will breed a slew of transformations that are here to stay, many of which are already evident.
Yet during times of great distress comes opportunity for innovation, ingenuity and triumph—the core of our American experience.
During the Great Depression, for example, the car radio, conceptualized decades prior, finally became a reality in 1930. Radio remains relevant today—and a worthy companion for the socially distant. King Kullen, the first supermarket, also opened in 1930, debuting a revolutionary model in food retailing and marketing that still exists today. And during the Spanish Flu of 1918, we witnessed the birth of the modern studio system when Adolph Zukor, co-founder of Paramount Pictures, consolidated an array of distressed theaters into a system that owned every aspect of filmmaking.
As you will see in this report, COVID-19 has catapulted streaming to become the present and future of content creation. Today, it accounts for 25% of our collective time spent with the television among streaming capable homes. Streaming has also taken hold among consumers 55 and older, often a technological sign of ubiquity and resolve.
Amid all the change, however, none is bigger than how many of us work—and that change may be more long-lasting than we originally expected.
The implications of a U.S. workforce that works remotely are seemingly endless. For one, companies will not be reliant on local talent. Then there’s the cultural and political exchange of city dwellers moving to less dense regions and vice-versa. That will have economic, voting and marketing implications—as well as opportunities. In a very short
period, housing trends are already highlighting these shifts, and in many locations, demand outweighs inventory.
That inventory, however, will need to be tech-enabled for our evolving lifestyles.
A decade ago, the U.S. Census reported that nearly 11% of the 128 million strong U.S. workforce either worked from home some or all of their time. COVID-19 has boosted that number, and everyone should be applying this reorientation to their critical thinking when it comes to driving ROI and thinking about their workforce.
For this report, we dove into remote working to assess how work-from-home consumers are adapting—and performing. Importantly, our research highlights just how quickly Americans have adapted and now WANT to work remotely, largely due to the flexibility it affords. In a special survey that we conducted, 73% of respondents said that
working from home gives them the freedom and flexibility that best suits their needs, and 80% of them prefer to work for companies that allow them to do so!
We think that this consumer preference, as well as this special analysis using our unparalleled panel to uncover real and actionable insights in media habits of remote workers, is a crucial piece of intelligence for the media industry and beyond and something only Nielsen can do.
While we are encouraged that COVID-19 might someday be mitigated, if not fully eradicated, some of the habits that consumers pick up from this time will stick. And small to big businesses all stand to win if they are agile enough to meet consumer demand, identify implications and understand the marketing challenges and rewards of these
habitual and geographic changes we are only beginning to uncover."

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