SINGAPORE: Marketers seeking to reach Southeast Asia's multiscreening consumers need to evolve their thinking from multi-channel to multi-moment, according to a new study.

Microsoft Advertising looked at multi-screen behaviour in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore and observed that a majority of consumers often picked up a second device during TV commercial breaks.

This tendency was especially marked in Malaysia and Indonesia, where eight in ten reported doing so. And it was only slightly less so in Singapore, where seven in ten multi-screened during TV ads.

If the ad breaks offered a convenient time to look at a second device, it was not the only time these consumers were doing so, as they exhibited a restlessness throughout their viewing.

Around four in ten said they always went online while watching TV, while a slightly higher proportion admitted they found it hard to spend one hour watching TV or a movie with using a second device,.

Thom Arkestaal, senior research and insights manager of emerging markets at Microsoft Advertising, identified four distinct types of multiscreening behaviour.

These were: content grazing, or simultaneous usage where users look for unrelated content; investigative spiderwebbing, or simultaneous usage where users look up additional related material; social spiderwebbing, or having a related social conversation.

Sequential multiscreening, the fourth behaviour, takes place one device at time as users seek to accomplish a particular task.

"Across different devices they key will be to get people to see the right creative at the right moment," Arkestaal explained to Campaign Asia-Pacific.

"Instead of having people see the same ad multiple times, it will have to be done across devices in such a way that people don't notice they are seeing ads, let alone repeatedly and in different contexts."

Simply putting a campaign on as many devices as possible is, he averred, "a waste of ad impressions and marketing budget".

Marketers need instead to use different screens and moments in combination to "build a whole picture of the brand".

Data sourced from Campaign Asia-Pacific; additional content by Warc staff