Commentary

The ABCs Of Becoming Kewl

Not so long ago, in an effort to catch up to a generation abandoning appointment TV like it was an STD, ABC launched a promotional campaign "to help consumers quickly identify and locate their favorite entertainment and news programming on television and beyond." This, even though Jack Myers' TV guru Ed Martin writes: "But it occurs to me that one broadcast network (ABC) has in the last two or three years become so identified as a destination for cool, smart young adults that it has gone and branded itself without necessarily attempting to do so."

"Using a modular icon system that is tied to the ABC logo, the consumer-oriented strategy simplifies navigation at many access points, proving (sic) information to viewers in what has become an increasingly cluttered world of media. This enhancement will give consumers a unique, clear and consistent set of visual tools to help them find new/additional content and information from one platform to the next," says part of a nearly unreadable press release about the promotion that astoundingly attributes a quote to two people simultaneously as if they were singing a duet.

OK, so you want to keep Ed stoked, you want to really show the world just how uber-kewl, 21st century-platform-agnostic-surround-the-consumer you've become--what do you do? Have Kate Walsh, Katherine Heigl and Evangeline Lilly enter wet T-shirt contests at spring break parties in Cancun, South Padre Island and Mazatlan, right? You underwrite a global rock concert, right? You hire Michael Tchong to ride naked on a white horse up Sixth Avenue, right? (aaayyyhhh?... best send that one back to committee).

No! You buy all of the advertising in that iconoclastic bastion of the rapidly dying dead-tree industry, TV Guide! Yes, by using this mag, with an average reader age of 44.5 and a median household income of a barely-blue-collar $49,466, there is a fair chance you'll reach not a living soul who even knows what a download is or who has a data plan for his mobile phone. Anyone in ABC's Gen X, Y or Z target audience caught by peers reading TV Guide would suffer ignominy on a scale that would make Ugly Betty feel like Carla Bruni.

TV Guide--on the blocks in one way or another for the past 10 years, with circulation dropping from a high water mark of 20 million in 1970 to about 3.2 million today--is the poster child of the ravages the new media age has wrought on magazine publishing. It is a product that lends itself to search-based interactivity, if for no other reason than it takes about 20 pages to cover a single's day's cable system listings. There is nothing kewl or hip about TV Guide. It was a magazine for a generation that now lives in wheelchairs or walkers and complains loudly (often to no one in particular) about ailments like it is an Olympic sport. And which still calls it "THE TV Guide."

Now, I appreciate that buying 21 ad pages at $188,200 per 4-color page (rate card; which no self-respecting agency has paid any magazine probably in the entire history of publishing) is a statement unto itself. After all, no one has ever done it before in the 55-year epoch of TV Guide. Or perhaps more to the point, the publisher has never allowed a single network to dominate what should be an objective review of broadcast and cable programming. But we live in difficult times--and an ad page is an ad page no matter where you find it, I guess.

I imagine it will be quite a stampede at the newsstand when the issues hits this week. That is, if anyone under 50 ever actually goes to a newsstand any more.

The story you have just read is an attempt to blend fact and fiction in a manner that provokes thought, and on a good day, merriment. It would be ill-advised to take any of it literally. Take it, rather, with the same humor with which it is intended. Cut and paste or link to it at your own peril.

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