• by Lydia Loizides , Op-Ed Contributor, May 7, 2007

I am tired of telling people in their mid-30s (myself included) to mid-60s that we just don’t matter to programmers and advertisers. When I was teaching last week, I actually uttered the phrase, “Because advertisers don’t give a s#$@ about you or what you like to watch on TV” to a woman in her early 40s.  To place this comment in context, our class was talking about the “demise” of the quality of network television.  What I realized, though, is that sometime in history, programmers and advertisers forgot that the “middle-aged” are really worth the effort of keeping interested. (By the way, if 50 is the new 40, does that mean that middle-aged is 60?)

In several conversations over the last few weeks, this idea of skewing younger kept rearing its yet-to-have-matured head. Networks clamoring to get the message across that their audience is younger, all to appease Madison Avenue during the upfronts. Down from an average of 54 years to 46 years! What a feat of programming savvy; what genius!  Uh-huh.

Well, how about this -- what would happen if you threw conventional thinking out the window and looked at the future with fresh eyes?  If you don’t, you will be missing out on the biggest opportunity to cash in since, well, the advent of television. What do I mean? Read on.

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine was a special issue about “The New Middle Ages” (For a complete overview, check it out online here.) There was an excellent article entitled, “TV’s Silver Age,” by Lorne Manly, all about TV Land’s move to capture and target “baby boomers” (a term, by the way, that seems oddly juxtaposed to how we regard them). 

Now I want every 20-something media planner, buyer and programming executive to stop and read this part carefully. I quote from the Times article:

“Every Wednesday morning, newspapers across the country run a chart of the previous week's highest-rated television shows. Most television executives basically ignore that list. They have eyes only for subsets of those overall figures, particularly one they call ‘the demo.’ That’s television speak for viewers ranging in age from 18 to 49. The demo may seem nonsensical -- after all, what does a high-school graduate have in common with someone becoming a grandmother for the first time? -- but it drives the television business.

“Television didn’t always chase this group. In the early years, Nielsen, the ratings arbiter, measured viewership more broadly. But a desperate, last-place ABC, back in the time when television meant three networks and not hundreds of channels, changed all that. Through the ‘50s and into the ‘60s, ‘ABC was always the runt of the litter,’ says Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC Universal and a former ABC executive. The network placed few shows in the Top 30. But it did attract plenty of youthful audiences. So in the ‘60s, ABC executives championed the 18-to-49 demographic. It still covered a large swath of the population, but it pushed the idea that this baby-boom generation -- the first one to grow up with television and of a size that dwarfed any cohort that came before -- would reshape American culture and its buying habits.

"Advertisers bit, and the special reports Nielsen ran for ABC soon became the currency of the television-advertising marketplace. ABC’s model of programming -- dramas with smoldering young leads (‘Ben Casey,’ ‘The Mod Squad’), cartoons (‘The Flintstones’), kid-friendly sitcoms (‘The Donna Reed Show’) -- was adapted by NBC and CBS, which had watched their higher-rated shows bring in proportionately less advertising revenue. Several endearing television characters at CBS suddenly vanished: Uncle Joe of ‘Petticoat Junction,’ derailed; Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason and their respective shows, jettisoned. In their place came more modern comedies like ‘All in the Family,’ ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ sitcoms that were urban, sardonic, current. The arrival of Fox in the 1980s with brash shows like ‘Married . . . With Children’ cemented the television industry’s infatuation with youth. Today, the first order of business for many a new network executive is to drive down the age of the typical viewer.”

The currency that drives the television/advertising marketplace seems to have been built on one network’s attempts to reinvent itself. Uh-huh.  What is truly ironic is that the masterminds of this trend are now part of the group that this very marketplace discards.  Uh-huh.

I guess what I am trying to say is this -- wake up and smell the impending, seismic demographic shift.  In case you haven’t heard, over the next 40 years the very fiber of the country’s demographic makeup, and therefore the content-(think television for now) consuming audience will change as well.  Put technological impacts, ethnic shifts, political and socioeconomic tides aside for the moment and just look at the numbers if you don’t believe me (for a complete forecast, please refer to the U.S. Census Bureau’s population forecast, 2000 – 2050). Maybe we ought to give a s#$@.