PTC Insider Article
February 2003

Want To Clean Up TV? Help the PTC Change the Way Advertisers Look at Audiences

There's one primary reason for the rapid deterioration of television standards, the proliferation of raunchy reality series, and the endless stream of tasteless sex jokes and graphic violence.  That reason is sitting on the couch in living rooms all over America,

We're talking about teenagers and young adults. 

In the worlds of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, youth reigns supreme.  Their thinking is this: teens and young adults have money to spend, and they're willing to spend it on new technologies, entertainment, beer -- all the things that major corporations with multi-million dollar advertising budgets want to peddle.  And the best way to make sure kids see these ads is to place them on shows that skew to a younger demographic.  Therefore, if you're a TV producer, luring young viewers (and ad dollars) means catering to adolescent tastes -- plenty of sex, violence, and puerile humor.  Family audiences are insignificant. Broadcast decency regulations aren't even paid lip service.

In the early days of television, series were designed to entertain the entire family (think Ed Sullivan, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) but today, movie and television studios are bending over backwards to appeal to younger and younger audiences – almost exclusively. Once you cross the threshold into the dreaded 50+ demographic, you are considered not merely irrelevant, but undesirable as an audience member. 

But the confounding part of this story is this:  there's no reason for it to be this way.  In fact, in a very real sense the logic is nonsense.  Young audiences don't have anywhere near as much discretionary income as adults.  Youngsters don't tend to buy big-ticket items, they watch less television than their parents, and in terms of the overall population, their numbers are shrinking.  Yet advertisers spend 95% of their budgets trying to reach youngsters, not adults! 

In the US alone, there are 75 million people over the age of 50, and the 55-plus-age segment is expected to grow by an astonishing 56% between now and 2020.  Baby boomers control over three-quarters of the country's personal financial assets ($7 trillion), and spend 50% of all discretionary income.  People over 50 spend the most per person on groceries, purchase 80% of luxury travel, 41% of all new cars and 25% of toys.  In fact, America's top spenders are between the ages of 45 and 54.

Therefore the key to restoring television to its roots as a socially responsible medium may very well lie in changing the way advertisers and network executives look at television audiences.  By encouraging the networks to focus on audiences other than 18-34 year-old males, by showing them how they are insulting older viewers by ignoring them, and by demonstrating to both the advertisers and the network executives that it's actually in their best interest to target adults, we can expect to see less of the envelope-pushing fare that has dominated the airwaves for the past several years.