Next time you contact GSN about rerunning, say, I dunno...The Hollywood Squares from the Peter Marshall years, and they cite their demographic line back to you like you're an idiot, here's something you can stuff back in their faces.

Props to TV Land president Larry Jones for commissioning this study, and for putting his money where his mouth is: when TV Land dropped The Andy Griffith Show from its prime time lineup, public outcry prompted them to put it back.

Same theory should apply to radio as well. There's a reason why people are turning off commercial AM & FM stations and playing more CDs, MP3s, ipods and satellite radios in their cars. A 300-song playlist only works for a top 40 or a station that is heavy on current songs -- not on stations whose genre spans multiple decades of the past.

I know I singled out GSN in my earlier post but NBC, ABC and Endemol could probably learn from this too. Maybe they'll finally get it that Goodson and Todman aren't bad words and might be worth some study.

Then again, I don't expect a whole industry full of suits who hard-sold all their bosses on the "35 and older doesn't matter" bit and bet their mortgages on it, to get religion overnight from this study.

I hate to say this since we're on the same team (and I'm 46 years old), but the point that networks make isn't that they can't draw a large total audience of older viewers, it's that the older audience that they draw isn't worth as much financially (a point also made in that article). If us older viewers find television in general alienating, that doesn't matter if they don't want us anyway.

In other words, the tone of the article (and your comment) is that the networks take the older audience for granted, and they better watch out, because we're upset. But the networks (most of them anyway) don't really care whether we're upset or not, since we're not their target audience. And the only purpose that a successful boycott would serve is to drive down the average age of their audience, which makes them look even more attractive to advertisers!

As the referenced article states, advertisers think the 18-34 demographic is the ideal one, since that's where lifelong consumption habits are supposedly set. And that's why programmers create shows targeted to that demographic, to satisfy the advertisers. But there was a long article about 6 years ago in the NY Times Magazine that made it quite clear that there was absolutely no proof, none, zero, zip, nada, that consumption habits are set between 18 and 34, and in fact the limited data available showed that it simply wasn't true. Advertisers believe it only because it's been repeated so many times. When CBS was struggling a few years ago in that demographic, they also made the point that 18-34 wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.

cweaver and Matt, I'm in the same boat as you two,and I will be 43 on 12/21.

The article makes that point (how much the viewers are worth in dollars) with the usual Nielsen numbers, but this new survey suggests that data is faulty and doesn't tell the whole story. We're apparently a considerably undervalued piece of TV audience real estate. Some of the long-held ideas about how people decide they like Pepsi in their 20s and won't change their minds in their 40s (among other ideas) are called into question. Of course I run into anecdotal evidence every day that questions the same thing, but I've never before seen a study that backed it up. It also suggests that the buyers who are pushing the 18-34 core market are very young themselves and that there's a disconnect between the way they think we'll behave and the way we really do. Sure, we love new ideas, as long as we're not treated like "waste circulation" getting leftovers from the 18-34 customers. I could've told them that, too.

And I don't think anyone's suggesting a boycott; I personally am suggesting we use this to counter the people who keep thinking those arguments about the 18-34 demos are enough to shut everyone up and end the discussion. Apparently, that's no longer true. It also suggests people our age are a formidable marketing force and the person who figures out a way to tap into it is the one who will rake in the money "no one else wanted." And the results could be surprising. Just ask the folks over at Harley Davidson.

There's probably nothing more uncool to the youngins than Ensure drinkers riding Harleys wearing Abercrombie.

...which would matter if the riders actually cared.

I'm not so sure about that. You really do need to try and target multiple audience, because then you have tunnel vision, and that's normally not a good thing.

Anyway, every time youth demographics comes up in discussion (I think this is the 3rd), I just have to refer people to this article that was part of my Mass Comm readings. I know it's 4 years old, but I find it interesting, especially since it has this point.



/There are probably less complicated links, but I think they require university-operated internet connections