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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. |
