• by August 25, 2004

THE PICTURE OF TELEVISION, GRAY --Nary a week goes by that someone doesn't have something bad to say about Nielsen's TV audience data - unless, of course, they happen to be experiencing a ratings upswing.

But some good news has come from Nielsen this week if you happen to be an eligible, heterosexual woman. According to newly revised population estimates released Wednesday by Nielsen, the number of adult men in the U.S. TV population is growing faster than adult women are. While women will still outnumber men, Nielsen's new 2004-05 TV season estimates find that men will represent 36.9 percent of the persons two-plus population. That's an increase of half a percentage point from just two seasons earlier, and is marginally closing the gap with adult women, who represent 40 percent of the TV universe.

While that's good news for anyone in the market to attract men in general, we suspect the numbers mask what's going on with younger men, a demographic that has been giving anyone not involved with the Web or video gaming a whole lot of agitation. In its new universe release, Nielsen did not break out young men demos by age, but a look at the pattern for the youngest demographic groups - teens and kids - offers some bad news for anyone looking to reach America's youngest TV viewers. Teens 12 to 17, already the slimmest sliver of the U.S. TV population, will decline 1.1 percent this season versus the number that was available during the 2002-03 season. The number of children two to 11, meanwhile, will drop by 0.9 percent.

This should no doubt be troubling for many major ad categories, including movies, video games, music, fashion, software, and even food, which have grown increasingly dependent on younger consumers, but which, as Nielsen's population trends suggest, will have far fewer of them in the future. That is unless the expanding population of adult men and women come together in such a way that triggers a new younger demographic boom.

Meanwhile, there is an even more troubling and perplexing finding in Nielsen's new TV universe estimates, which show that the number of TV households is growing faster than the number of human beings. While the pattern can be explained by the shrinking of average U.S. household size, it's a concern for some TV advertisers, especially the big ones who've been backing family-friendly programming development. There simply are fewer family-viewing situations. A development made all the more alarming when you consider that the number of TV sets available in the average household also continues to expand, not to mention a slew of other competing electronic media technologies such as Internet access, video gaming, DVDs, etc.

But there's one other stat that may factor into the whole TV viewer availability scenario. Recently, the intrepid reporters at MediaDailyNews broke the story that last year, for the first time ever, Nielsen actually recorded a decrease in the number of TV channels available to the average TV household. It declined from about 102 in 2002 to roughly 100 in 2003. There have been many explanations for that development, but the one obvious conclusion is that - even with the expansion of digital cable and satellite TV service - the TV channel universe is not as unlimited as people like John Malone had originally projected. We'll keep an eye on that situation for sure, especially as new means of TV channel distribution continue to evolve. But the short-term result of these overlapping patterns is that while the number of TV channels available to the average household is shrinking, the number of people available to watch them continues to expand. And that means Madison Avenue may be getting a respite - a short one, anyway - in another bedeviling media marketplace development: fragmentation. Stay tuned!

Demographic Estimates Within U.S. TV Households

	2004-05 Universe	Vs. 2002-03
Households:	109.60 million	+2.7 percent
Persons 2+:	277.93 million	+2.2 percent
Women 18+:	111.07 million	+2.7 percent
Men 18+:	102.66 million	+3.7 percent
Teens 12-17:	24.56 million	-1.1 percent
Children 2-11:	39.64 million	-0.9 percent

Source: Nielsen Media Research.