From the Journal:
For years, #media executives built their pitches to advertisers around the idea that they could reach younger audiences, with viewers 18 to 49 years old drawing a big premium and those 25 to 54 offering the greatest appeal to news advertisers.
But there is a hard reality these days: Most people watching #TV are older than those groups. Among cable channels, the median age for TNT and Bravo viewers is 56, for HGTV it is 66, and even the once-youthful MTV’s median-age viewer is 51, according to Nielsen data. The cable news audience is even older, with MSNBC’s median age at 70, Fox News Media’s at 69 and CNN’s, 67. Among broadcasters, CBS’s median age is 64 and ABC’s is 66.
Now media executives are embracing a new sell. They are focusing more on the mass-market reach of TV, and playing down the importance of age for advertisers. What really matters, they say, is whether your ad is reaching people who are likely to buy your product, whether they are 37 or 67.
“Everybody uses credit cards and buys paper towels and buys insurance and buys phone plans, so those are not age-specific things,” said Colleen Fahey Rush, chief research officer at Paramount, owner of CBS and cable channels such as MTV and Comedy Central.
The approach hasn’t stopped the overall erosion in spending on TV ads, as marketers turn to other venues—from Amazon to TikTok to Google—to reach consumers, especially younger ones.
The media companies have pitched their #streaming services—NBCUniversal’s Peacock, Warner Bros. Discovery’s HBO Max, Paramount’s Paramount+, The Walt Disney Company’s Disney+ and Hulu—as ways to reach younger audiences. So far, though, the influx of ad dollars into streaming hasn’t been enough to offset the decline in TV viewership, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
The goal for media companies is to make the most of the TV audience they do have—and cushion the blow of the industry’s decline.
“For decades, we have transacted on age and gender, like adults 25 to 54, as if everyone in this whole segment is the same person buying the same products at the same time,” Mark Marshall, NBCUniversal’s global #advertising and partnerships chairman, told advertisers in the room. The goal, he said, should be to find “people who are in the market for your product.”
The median age of an “Abbott Elementary” viewer is 61 on ABC and 36 on streaming services, according to Nielsen data. For “The Bachelor,” the median age of a viewer is 60 on traditional TV and 32 on streaming.
For all the talk from media executives about how the age of viewers is now irrelevant—how reaching willing buyers is all that really matters to advertisers—the ad business has been slow to modernize. A lot of ad sales are still happening the old-fashioned way, with networks promising to reach
viewers in particular age groups.
“Revolutions are hard for these large entities,” Liguori said of media companies and advertisers. “This is going to happen faster and faster.”
Congratulations, what an achievement 👏