Posted 2:12 PM by Blah blah

On TV advertising. The Myth of '18 to 34' (NY Times):
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But if you consider that a TV network's true audience is advertisers, then you're on your way to understanding why Tuesday night is, in fact, a big moneymaker for the WB. The network more than makes up for its abysmal ratings by charging an inflated ad rate for those few viewers its shows manage to attract. A 30-second commercial spot on ''Gilmore Girls'' costs about $82,000 -- nearly threequarters of the fee for advertising on an episode of, say, ''Law and Order: SVU,'' an NBC program that regularly has about three times the number of viewers. The WB gets away with this because its overall ratings, poor as they appear, were up 5 percent in the 18-to-34-year-old category last season, and while ''Gilmore Girls'' may be among the least-watched series on television, it's also No. 2 in its time slot among viewers aged 18 to 34.

Eighteen to thirty-four: for decades, conventional advertising wisdom has attached the adjective ''coveted'' to this slice of the viewing audience. According to an analysis by the former NBC News president Lawrence K. Grossman, advertisers pay an average of $23.54 to reach 1,000 viewers in that age bracket, versus $9.57 per 1,000 over the age of 35. And since commercial television, whatever else it may be, is fundamentally a system for delivering audiences to advertisers, network executives lose a lot of sleep trying to figure out what will hold fast the slippery attention of people in their late teens, 20's and early 30's. It is, as it has been for 40 years, the principle by which a great deal of our popular culture -- not just TV, but music, movies, radio -- comes into existence.

The odd thing is, there's no real reason for it anymore.

People over the age of 50 account for half of all the discretionary spending in the United States. Proportionally speaking, there are more of them than there ever were, and they are voracious cultural consumers. They watch more television, go to more movies and buy more CD's than young people do. Yet Americans over 50 are the focus of less than 10 percent of the advertising....

And what of the theory of brand loyalty -- the idea that winning over the young consumer means winning him or her over for life? There the big change has come about not so much in the young but in the old. The baby-boom generation, raised in front of the TV, just never became brand-loyal in the way their parents were. Everyone is pretty malleable these days: 67 percent of female heads of household between 18 and 34 were willing, in a Nielsen study, to try a new brand even if it went against their customary buying habits; the corresponding number in the 35-to-64 age bracket was 70 percent.

Even the argument that most pop culture is for young people because young people consume the most pop culture has begun to fall apart. ESPN's highly promoted X Games, a kind of ''alternative'' Olympics featuring skateboarders, BMXers and the like (referred to by The Wall Street Journal as ''the Holy Grail of youth marketing'') was outperformed this summer on the network's primary channel by the bargain-basement Great Outdoor Games, a decidedly non-youth-oriented event featuring lumberjack contests and the talents of various sporting dogs. Over the last decade, the proportion of the national moviegoing audience between the ages of 50 and 59 doubled, while the proportion of teenagers shrank steadily. The percentage of CD's sold to consumers over 45 doubled as well.

And yet the romanticization of youth persists: the adjective ''coveted'' has been joined by the phrase ''hard to reach'' as a justification for the premium advertisers continue to pay to speak to the 18-to-34 crowd. Put aside for the moment the fact that these so-called hard-to-reach young adults spend an awful lot of time with the TV on -- men between 18 and 24 watch more than 20 hours a week, according to the Nielsen people; put aside the fact that those young X Games rebels come plastered head to toe with corporate logos. What logic suggests that, because there are proportionally fewer young people than there used to be, because they have less money than they used to and because it's harder to separate them from that money than ever, advertisers should spend more money trying to court them? It would make as much sense to say that advertisers really ought to pay top dollar for viewers who don't have any spending money at all.