 |
| were I really good at Photoshop I'd have put an R after the G. But I'm lousy at photoshop and Canadians would be insulted by the misspelling. So it's Gray/Grey Pride. Damn funny picture though. |
Inside Television 515
Publication date: 8-20-10
By: Hubert O’Hearn
I have to admit, there is something smugly satisfying in seeing facts justify one’s suspicions. There has been a column idea tramping around in the back of my head for the past couple of weeks. You see, I also archive these columns and other articles on my web blogs. (I’m not sure it’s morally right to give myself a free ad by putting a url here. Search Google - it’s all out there.) I started this back in March.
You do get a sense of your audience this way. Google supplies a very good basic package of analytics with their free blogging service. Incredibly simple to use too. But, except for a book review of The Tower, The Zoo and The Tortoise that hasn’t run yet in print, far and away the most popular thing I’ve written was a largely nostalgia-based column on TV Moms.
I was surprised and kind of relieved. Here I was thinking that I was perhaps under-servicing the youth market. I’d started cutting back on allusions to yesteryear (he says looking over at Eric Dowd who does just that every week from Queen’s Park) or when I have used them I’ve tried to explain them fully. To get all puffy and sociological sounding, I feared that the common cultural vocabulary had shifted forward.
Well, what the hell do I know? Nostalgia sells. There are still people - mostly Americans and Chinese (I don’t know why either) - hitting on that June column every day. So I was seriously wondering if the TV audience was in fact aging. It would make sense. people do tend to get stuck with a technology they understand. The elderly still play their records and generally speaking were the last generation to always have someone in the family who could hammer out a few numbers on the family piano, rather than the guitar.
So on Tuesday of this week I read that the median age for the Big Four American networks is - try and guess - fifty one. 51! After all these years, I have become a key demographic point. Even Fox, the self-described ‘young’ network has a median age of 44; which also interestingly is the median age for the American Idol audience.
What does this mean? Well, quickly and superficially I’d bet the farm on Shania Twain becoming the new judge on Idol. She’s 40. She’s hot. She’s in.
For sports, TNA Impact! is undoubtedly right in dusting off Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair and Kevin Nash and putting them front and centre. That’s who the TV audience grew up watching. They can’t see Ken Stabler go deep to win the game in the fourth quarter any more, but they can see Flair bleed all over the place.
Advertising agencies seem calm as ohming Buddhist monks about this demographic shift. Older people do have money, after all; and needs for hair products, pee products and Viagra ads sprouting like wild wheat on Prairie fields.
And the broadcasters are sanguine about it all too. From the AP story by-lined to David Bauder:
“You hear people saying, ‘Your audiences are older now and you don’t have the young people you used to have in the 1980s,’” said David Poltrack, chief research executive at CBS. “I say, ‘Yeah, the U.S. auto companies aren’t controlling 80 per cent of the market any more, either.’ ”
But in the larger dimension, there are opportunities and problems. Knowing that the audience is the same audience craved for from 1975 to 1985, look back at what the hit shows were then and re-work them now. Please don’t just re-make them. I have this tidal wave of fear that the rolling drum and charging surfer announcing the revival of Hawaii Five-O will rapidly lead to a disaster of flood relief proportion.
The new Law & Order (if such an adjective can be applied to the ancient order) set in Los Angeles and the new Jimmy Smits legal series Outlaw could both work. Why? Seems to me that Columbo worked pretty well in L.A. as did Dragnet as did L.A. Law which had a young star named, er, Jimmy Smits. Even from this distant hinterland of North America that I live in, I can see Ted Danson affixing a hairpiece right now and saying to Mary Steenburgen, ‘we’re back in the game honey!’
In the long run, it’s not good. Television will run out of audience at about the point the world runs out of oil. Not very damn long in other words. But by then, the ad executives, the TV executives ... and the oil executives of today all will have retired. So until then - party on!
In re-reading the previous I almost thought there was a moral in there. Then I remembered: television has no morals. Party on! Be seeing you.
Publication date: 8-20-10
By: Hubert O’Hearn
I have to admit, there is something smugly satisfying in seeing facts justify one’s suspicions. There has been a column idea tramping around in the back of my head for the past couple of weeks. You see, I also archive these columns and other articles on my web blogs. (I’m not sure it’s morally right to give myself a free ad by putting a url here. Search Google - it’s all out there.) I started this back in March.
You do get a sense of your audience this way. Google supplies a very good basic package of analytics with their free blogging service. Incredibly simple to use too. But, except for a book review of The Tower, The Zoo and The Tortoise that hasn’t run yet in print, far and away the most popular thing I’ve written was a largely nostalgia-based column on TV Moms.
I was surprised and kind of relieved. Here I was thinking that I was perhaps under-servicing the youth market. I’d started cutting back on allusions to yesteryear (he says looking over at Eric Dowd who does just that every week from Queen’s Park) or when I have used them I’ve tried to explain them fully. To get all puffy and sociological sounding, I feared that the common cultural vocabulary had shifted forward.
Well, what the hell do I know? Nostalgia sells. There are still people - mostly Americans and Chinese (I don’t know why either) - hitting on that June column every day. So I was seriously wondering if the TV audience was in fact aging. It would make sense. people do tend to get stuck with a technology they understand. The elderly still play their records and generally speaking were the last generation to always have someone in the family who could hammer out a few numbers on the family piano, rather than the guitar.
So on Tuesday of this week I read that the median age for the Big Four American networks is - try and guess - fifty one. 51! After all these years, I have become a key demographic point. Even Fox, the self-described ‘young’ network has a median age of 44; which also interestingly is the median age for the American Idol audience.
What does this mean? Well, quickly and superficially I’d bet the farm on Shania Twain becoming the new judge on Idol. She’s 40. She’s hot. She’s in.
For sports, TNA Impact! is undoubtedly right in dusting off Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair and Kevin Nash and putting them front and centre. That’s who the TV audience grew up watching. They can’t see Ken Stabler go deep to win the game in the fourth quarter any more, but they can see Flair bleed all over the place.
Advertising agencies seem calm as ohming Buddhist monks about this demographic shift. Older people do have money, after all; and needs for hair products, pee products and Viagra ads sprouting like wild wheat on Prairie fields.
And the broadcasters are sanguine about it all too. From the AP story by-lined to David Bauder:
“You hear people saying, ‘Your audiences are older now and you don’t have the young people you used to have in the 1980s,’” said David Poltrack, chief research executive at CBS. “I say, ‘Yeah, the U.S. auto companies aren’t controlling 80 per cent of the market any more, either.’ ”
But in the larger dimension, there are opportunities and problems. Knowing that the audience is the same audience craved for from 1975 to 1985, look back at what the hit shows were then and re-work them now. Please don’t just re-make them. I have this tidal wave of fear that the rolling drum and charging surfer announcing the revival of Hawaii Five-O will rapidly lead to a disaster of flood relief proportion.
The new Law & Order (if such an adjective can be applied to the ancient order) set in Los Angeles and the new Jimmy Smits legal series Outlaw could both work. Why? Seems to me that Columbo worked pretty well in L.A. as did Dragnet as did L.A. Law which had a young star named, er, Jimmy Smits. Even from this distant hinterland of North America that I live in, I can see Ted Danson affixing a hairpiece right now and saying to Mary Steenburgen, ‘we’re back in the game honey!’
In the long run, it’s not good. Television will run out of audience at about the point the world runs out of oil. Not very damn long in other words. But by then, the ad executives, the TV executives ... and the oil executives of today all will have retired. So until then - party on!
In re-reading the previous I almost thought there was a moral in there. Then I remembered: television has no morals. Party on! Be seeing you.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar