Larry Rosin: What Wakes You Up?

This guest column is contributed by Larry Rosin, President of Edison Research. It was first published on The Infinite Dial blog.

At last week’s Country Radio Seminar, we debuted the results of our “Wake Me Up!” research study about behaviors and media habits of online 18-54 year-olds in America. There were many surprise findings; today I’d like to focus on what happens in the very first moments of one’s day.

As the first graph here shows — only about half of people are actually awakened by an alarm of any kind. One third of 18-54s just ‘get up’ on their own, and another one-sixth are awakened by another person or a pet.

We then went on to ask the half of the sample that does awaken to an alarm what kind of an alarm it was:

As you can see, the mobile revolution has really hit here. While 47% seem to awaken to something like the classic ‘clock-radio’ that we envision next to Bill Murray in Groundhog Day — most of them use the beep or buzz feature instead of the radio. This means that only 6% of our sample wakes up to the radio on a clock radio.