This study commissioned by Thinkbox from Work Research looked at student life in halls of residence and shared housing and explored the role of technology and TV within their increasingly connected and digitally enabled lives.

"There are 1.5 million students living away from home, and the numbers are growing every year. They're not covered by BARB - except as guest viewers when they return to the family home - and yet they are keen viewers, and pro TV advertising. We need to know more about how we can reach and influence them. Hopefully, this is a start."

Dave Brennan, Research and Strategy Director, Thinkbox.

In the film show here, Dave Brennan, Research and Strategy Director at Thinkbox, explores this audience with Justin Gibbons from Work Research.

For those who prefer to read, we've posted a transcript of Dave and Justin's conversation below.

The Secret Lives of Students
with Justin Gibbons and David Brennan

DAVE: "Bloody students, what are they like?" Well that's it, we just don't know. There's about one and a half million of them here in the UK and the numbers are growing all the time. They're living away from home, quite often for the first time ever. They're at a unique life stage and they're living a unique lifestyle and yet we know next to nothing about them. They're not even covered by BARB viewing system.

That's why we at Thinkbox commissioned Work Research to investigate the lives of students; what media they use, how they relate to those different media and how they relate to the advertising that comes with those media. Welcome to the third edition of TV Bites, The Secret Lives of Students.

Now Justin, you've done a lot of research into youth, I think you actually traipsed round all the festivals last year looking at youth in their natural habitat. Did you find the way Students are living their lives very different to other types of youth audience?

JUSTIN: These guys are living a very different kind of life and there are lots of contradictions running through what they're doing. They've got tons of freedom, and can do what they like, but at the same time, they've got lots of restrictions. They've got very little money and live in very tight little communities. In many ways, they're aspirational but their horizons are quite narrow. These are one of the most unusual audiences we've ever met, because they're living in such a strange way.

DAVE: Do the clichés hold true?

JUSTIN: Lots of the clichés did: kitchens you couldn't walk into; rotting bowls of food with spoons sticking out of the fur, all that stuff came true. At the same time, they are massively connected, with lots of media going on, and can't live without their broadband connection. So, some strange things are playing out in this lifestyle.

DAVE: One of those clichés is that students move away from home, they go to a new college or university, and immediately they're living this incredibly extrovert life.

JUSTIN: I think it's a real balance actually. In every household we went to there's someone with green hair because they're experimenting, and that's about being an extrovert, but at the same time they're living these little rationed lives and it's very inward looking. It's a contradiction in many ways, but we saw both playing out all the time for these kids.

DAVE: You also mentioned earlier that they've probably got more access to technology, particularly digital technology, than any generation's had before. Is their use of technology influenced by this lifestyle?

JUSTIN: If you look at their use of technology it's driven exactly by the kind of balance they're playing out in their broader life. Some of their uses of technology, TV and internet, are all about discovery and experimentation, and at the same time they are driven by a real need to belong. So, Facebook is a virus - it's a disease in student households. Some guys were spending six or seven hours on Facebook. But this is of course the perfect little community; a little network device. They don't even have to go to the pub they can just socialise on this website.

DAVE: So in terms their "normal media feed", does that suffer as a result?

JUSTIN: Some normal media does suffer. I didn't see a magazine in these households, the whole time I was there. We rarely saw a newspaper. But actually the reason that other media isn't displaced is because they've got tons and tons of time and they're finding ways to fill it. They've got more and more time to experiment with lots of other new things, and traditional media feeds, by and large, just expand to fill the gap.

DAVE: So the well worn out anecdote about students spending their whole time watching Countdown or I guess now it's Deal or No Deal still has a bit of basis in fact.

JUSTIN: Deal or No Deal came out loads - the girls watching the daytime shows. Tricia and the Richard and Judy were endemic. And it's interesting to play that back, because what they're also doing is creating something to talk about. Within these little communities, if you've watched shows like Tricia, Hollyoaks or Home and Away, you've got a little bit of currency. They're also keeping up with each other by watching tons of it. One girl realised she'd watched something like eight or nine hours of TV in one day and was kind of guiltily saying she doesn't think that's necessarily abnormal.

DAVE: That's really interesting because on the one hand you talk about how their own personal schedules mean they're available to use a lot more media, watch a lot more TV, albeit at different times to when living at home. But you also mentioned the communal living; the need to belong and that whole shared experience. I wondered does that change if someone goes from perhaps the residential hall to a communal household?

JUSTIN: In Halls, you've got your own little room and TV's role was company late at night. There was one girl who'd had her telly on a snooze button, so it of went off a few hours after she'd fallen asleep because she didn't like sleeping without any lights on: she was scared of the dark.

Once you move into a shared house things were really different. You've got that kind of Hollyoaks, Home and Away moment, which for some of them is when they are just getting up. It's the first time when they all gather. In fact, lots of them are watching Hollyoaks twice; that's the extent to which it fills dead time. And they don't worry too much about watching it twice (watching it on a stagger cast channel) - they'll know what's coming up the next day.

The whole thing in shared houses is a battle for control. We were in one house where there are twelve people and consensus viewing is really difficult. They end up watching some real lowest common denominator programmes. But, if you want control, you just stay up later. This does mean you end up watching really weird stuff. We had one guy who's really into Spring Watch. During the night they can tune into these late nights feeds of the badgers waking up.

Their TV viewing starts to exist in a very strange way as they battle for the remote; from people trading washing-up for TV time, or "we'll have some soaps you can have some sport" between the girls and the boys. We saw little allegiances made: couples would become really powerful in these houses because there are two of them and they can start to out-vote other power groups and make sure they get what they watch. So we saw some really interesting little kind of behaviours as well as just staying up later than anyone else.

DAVE: One of the stereotypes I thought might come into play in this research was their attitude towards advertising, because I remember back in my day when students were quite politically radical and anti-capitalist. I wondered whether that still holds true, and if so whether that affects the way that they respond to advertising and respond to the advertised messages.

JUSTIN: I have to say I didn't meet lots of communists or people's poets. You get one or two who are on politics courses who are a bit more politically aligned but, by and large what we did find, certainly among second and third years, is that they're aspirational. Most of them are looking forward to, and hoping to have, professional careers and they're actually fairly commercially savvy. They're fairly corporately minded. Actually, I think the kind of political paradigm of "studentdom" in the Sixties has probably been replaced a bit by more green issues. We didn't get the no-logo bible-thumpers wanting to bring down Macdonalds. Most of them are actually "playing the game" in a pretty savvy way. They're quite into Skype and lots of them are getting free programming. They want to play the system a bit. In a year's time a lot of them are going to be in the system. They're looking forward to their first jobs and they rather hope these jobs are going to be quite good ones and that they're going have lots of money. So we didn't get the people's poet unfortunately.

DAVE: So advertisers can still legitimately target them and engage them?

JUSTIN: Well it's interesting, on the one hand they haven't got much money, so whilst they enjoy Sony TV ads they're not going to run out and buy a Bravia. But on the other hand, the one bit of their brain that is engaging with all this is three or four years away -because they are incredibly optimistic and think they're gonna do really well - and brand associations are definitely being seeded at this stage in their life. In a few years time they're hoping to be buying that car or that TV.

DAVE: What are the kind of advertisers that they would specifically mention in terms of ads that they relate to or just love?

JUSTIN: We got three or four different types of advertising. One is the glossier, more impressive, highly aspirational advertising. That works for them because they can absorb it as entertainment, and bearing in mind they've got a lot of time to fill with entertainment, they're quite happy to have it. We also got them being quite responsive to sale messages and deals and, not surprisingly, they respond to those because they're good deals. Some advertising takes on a kind of cult, post-modern kind of thing in households. They play with the advertising much more than we see in normal households. Bear in mind they sit there for ages, un-sober, watching this stuff. It becomes part of the games they play, especially when they're watching later and later at night. Lots of them have got multi-channel so they're dipping into all sorts of odd channels with great big long ad breaks full of stuff that isn't really targeted at them. But they all know how to play with the finance ads, and they know how to play with the loan ads, and the ambulance-chaser ads, and they have great fun, late at night playing around with these things.

DAVE: I'm also interested in this relationship between broadcast TV and on-line because we talk about them having lots of kit and lots of time

JUSTIN: We saw a very strong relationship between television and on-line, stronger than I've seen in all the other research that we do. What's it driven by? Partly they've all got PCs in their bedroom and the bedroom provides quite an important kind of hidey-hole for them. This is their little bit of independence, so that's important.

We saw lots of the broadcasters' on demand services: 4oD is being used by just about every student we spoke to. They're keeping up with series, they're using it to fill dead time, especially in halls of residence, where they haven't got sophisticated multi-channel TVs. But 4oD means they can constantly dip into a lot of their favourite programming and they're envisaging lots more converged services. They're looking for things that live across lots of different platforms and instinctively they can imagine it on their mobile and on their PC and on their ipod and on their TV. So they're a really multi-platform bunch of people. I suppose they've just come into a period in their lives where the doors of choice have opened up for them. So when they live at home their parents pretty much tell them what to watch, and suddenly they're allowed to watch what the hell they like and they've discovered a world out there where there's tons of choice. At the same they realise that this has been their golden age of TV. They've never watched as much TV as this past three years and I got a feeling they were already starting to realise what they're going lose: they're going to get jobs; TV viewing is going become completely squeezed; they'll never get the chance to play with the TV set as much as they do now. They've got one eye on the future.

DAVE: So if I was planning a campaign aimed at students what would you advise me I should be looking to do?

JUSTIN: In terms of TV day part, I suppose some of the key adult areas, post nine till 12, is not where students are going be focussed. There's tons of daytime viewing, so you're picking up loads of them then. That kind of soap and pre-soap period is really important. Don't bother with really early mornings. There's some late-night stuff, which is not to be frightened away from. There are certain bits of cult programming. In terms of genre, there is lowest common denominator stuff that a lot of them go for in big households, "day-time" time stuff. But equally lots of that is semi-factual, for example Grant on Gangs. Cult comedy really comes through as being as important as soaps. That's the grammar of their day so they're building lots of programming around that and there are lots of opportunities to reach them. I think creatively there are probably some insights too: if they can play with your advertising, if there's a bit of negotiating space around the ad, if there's something in there that they can toy around with, then this the audience who will play with advertising more than any other.

There's also the on-line stretch. This is an audience who are very aware of brands in that TV on-line space. So there is also some opportunities there I would have thought.