• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, August 3, 2009

For Craig Ferguson it's all about how TV's most valuable target audience got that way -- and why that's so wrong.

Ferguson, of CBS' "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson," went off on a monologue rant last week on his show about how the TV industry became so enamored with targeting young viewers -- much to its  demise.

He said it started in the 1950s and took off for somewhat unscientific reasons. All that led Ferguson to bluntly say at the start: "I figured out why everything sucks." Why? Because young viewers (right or wrong) are so important to the performance of his show.

Ferguson goes on to say TV advertisers figured out if they sold things to people at a young age they would keep buying those same products for the rest of their lifetime -- so called "brand loyalty."

But Ferguson said this got out of hand. "What use to be celebrated was experience and cleverness," he says. No longer. "So it became fashionable and desirable to be young -- and stupid." He says the byproduct of youth was inexperience.

Weirdly, it took a late night TV host to tell his viewers -- young and old -- how the TV business and its advertisers operate.

Ferguson attacks the stage like he just got out of a meeting with CBS advertising executives where he was briefed on his all-important 18-49 and 18-34 ratings -- key young-skewing viewers important for the advertising health of his late-night show, as well as every other late-night TV talk program.

This comic rant wasn't written by the CBS marketing department, but it sounds like something CBS would back wholeheartedly. CBS has long struggled to get younger viewers to its network. But it has had no problem with middle aged and older viewers. Why should it be penalized for that?

"So they started dying their hair and mutilating their faces and bodies to be young," Ferguson angrily goes on . "But you can't be young forever. That's against the laws of the universe."

The end result? It comes to this, he says: "Now we have this terrible place where we have the [bleeping] Jonas Brothers!"