The Sternberg Report

Mad Men: Remembering "The Good Old Days"

The final seven episodes of season 7 of Mad Men begin on Sunday, April 5th.   

Can it really be eight years ago when the folks at AMC came in to see my group (when I was at Magna Global), nervously bringing with them a tape of a new scripted series called Mad Men?  They were wondering how advertisers would react, and how they should market the show.  They were doing the same with other media agency groups all over town.

An Expensive but Brilliant Risk

When Mad Men debuted in July 2007, original scripted programming had not yet enjoyed widespread success in basic cable.  There were just a few sporadic successes. FX was just winding down The Shield, and was a year away from Sons of Anarchy.  USA had some modest success with Monk, The 4400, and Psych.  TNT was two years into its hit drama, The Closer. Lifetime had just debuted Army Wives.  And now AMC of all networks, known among ad buyers for old movies and old viewers, was trying to pitch a new, stylish period piece about the ad industry (a subject that had never done well on TV in the past).  It was an expensive, and ultimately brilliant, risk.

After a group of about 10 of us saw the pilot, there was silence for a few seconds.  Then I said, "I think you might have something here."  A few others agreed, but it was by no means unanimous. That’s not to say I thought it would be the influential iconic series it turned out to be, but I thought it was well worth the effort.  I had long had debates with some of my colleagues about network branding.  My belief has always been people don’t watch networks, they watch programs.  As long as you effectively promoted a new show beyond your own air, a good series can find an audience.

The cast were not well known at the start, but Mad Men continued to prove one of my favorite sayings, “Stars don’t make shows, shows make stars.”

While never a major ratings success, it has had a fiercely loyal audience and a fundamental impact on the medium, becoming the first basic-cable series to win an Emmy for best drama.  It may not in and of itself made that much money for the network, but it paved the way for other groundbreaking AMC series, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, not to mention numerous series on other cable networks.  It may also have been the first series to inspire “binge” viewing, or at least helped coin the term.

Mad Men was fortunate to come at a time when cable networks were starting to look for new ways to re-brand themselves and go after original scripted series.  Had the show received the ratings it got on AMC on any broadcast network, it might have been canceled after it’s first or second telecast.

Was the Ad Industry Really Like That?

A lot of people have asked me if the ad industry was even remotely similar to how it is portrayed on Mad Men. 

Well, I started working in the media department at Ted Bates & Company in 1979.  Unlike the world of Mad Men, media departments were now well established.  It was right before the Reagan era, when Wall Street supplanted Advertising as the glamour job.  But when I started out, there were at least 20 people competing for every entry level advertising position. The great advertising agencies, like Ogilvy and Mather, J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam, Doyle, Dane, Bernback,, Ted Bates & Company, Benton & Bowles, McCann-Erickson, and many others, were still intact and independent.. 

But the overall Mad Men environment and attitudes, while starting to change, still existed to a large degree.

• I originally wanted to be an account executive, but was told that Jews had very little chance of getting anywhere in advertising outside of media.  They would let us handle the money, but not deal directly with clients or top agency management.
  

• Many of the hard-core drinkers were being drummed out of the business (at least on the agency side), but some of my bosses had several bottles of liquor in their bottom desk drawers (although office bars as seen in Mad Men were no longer prevalent).

• When I went to a business lunch, if you didn't get at least one hard drink people looked at you like there was something wrong. If we were taken out to lunch on a Friday, we were basically out for the rest of the day. On Friday night, we'd go to the bar downstairs and hang out all night (I was young, single, and living in Manhattan).
  

• At off-site gatherings, executives freely smoked pot and did other things that today would do a lot more than just raise eyebrows.
  

• There were no computers or even faxes, so the business moved much more slowly. During the upfront, a plan would come in from the networks, we'd spend two or three hours analyzing it by hand on calculators, while our bosses would go out to long lunches and health clubs for the afternoon. Then they'd come back around 6 or 7pm ready to work. This is probably how the upfront first became a late night negotiating process.
  

• Women were still treated poorly. There were very few female department heads, and the ones I knew were tough cookies (they had to be). We had one male intern, who swatted a female co-worker of mine on the butt with a newspaper as she was passing by. While he was told that this was inappropriate behavior in the workplace (I guess as opposed to outside the office), he was not disciplined or fired. Many men still assumed that female bosses must have slept their way to the top.  Common language used in the workplace would today lead to a non-stop string of sexual harassment lawsuits.

• I knew several executives who had affairs with, and ultimately married, their secretaries.

• Racism was no longer overt, but was nonetheless rampant.  I actually had a woman in Human Resources (then called Personnel) at one of my subsequent agencies, tell me before sending me a potential candidate, "I just wanted to let you know she's black.  Is that a problem?"  And this was in the early 1980s!

By 1985, much of this had changed. But it changed for good when Ted Bates & Company, then the 3^rd largest ad agency in the U.S., was sold that year for $450 million, and its CEO walked away with a reported $110 million.  A lot of other folks at the company also got a lot of money.  Clients started saying, “What the heck is going on here?  These guys are making too much money.”  Commissions clients paid to agencies started to change, agency margins started to fall, many of the great ad agencies started to merge or be sold, media departments started to spin-off into separate agencies, and giant advertising holding companies were formed.  The fun, to a large degree, was over. 

While the early 1980s, when I started my career, were nothing like the early 1960s portrayed in Mad Men, the environment I experienced when I started out makes me believe the advertising world it portrays on TV was not far off the mark (although certainly exaggerated for dramatic effect).  The good old days were not good for everyone, but it certainly makes for good television. I'd love to see what happens to Don Draper and his crowd (both at work and at home) during the 1970s and 1980s.

While I haven't yet seen any of the upcoming episodes, I'm going to relish the experience.  Shows like Mad Men are few and far between.  While I often DVR and view two or three episodes at a time, since I don't want to have to avoid all the spoilers on social media, I'll probably watch these final seven episodes live (or at least before I go to bed on Sunday night).

Lessons to Take Away From Empire's Success

The success of FOX’s new drama, Empire, has rightfully attracted much praise and headlines.  

Major hit status, of course, is relative these days.  Empire achieves about a 4 Nielsen rating among Adults 18-34, a 4.5 rating among Adults 18-49, and a 5 rating among Adults 25-54.  By comparison, CBS’s hit, The Big Bang Theory gets about the same rating as Empire among Adults 18-49.

My 15-year-old son never misses an episode.  He actually didn’t see the first four episodes, but caught up on Hulu.  He just told me he was going to have to stay up late to watch the finale.  I said he should just DVR it, and he looked at me like I had two heads.  Everyone in is school is going to be talking about it the next day, so he has to watch it live.

As the broadcast networks plan their schedules for next season, what lessons should they take away from this?  First let’s get some historical perspective.

• The blockbuster original Cosby Show led to numerous failed comedies with African-American casts.

• The success of Friends did not mean that viewers wanted more shows about twenty-somethings or groups of friends. In fact several that immediately followed were instant flops.

• The Simpsons became a cultural icon, and led to several failed primetime animation series until Family Guy hit.

• Grey’s Anatomy, which came out of nowhere in mid-season, did not mean people wanted more medical dramas.  None materialized over the next few seasons.

• The successes of Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory did not lead to other similar hits or a comedy renaissance.

• 24 became a cultural touch-point, but a number of attempts to catch its lightning in another bottle failed miserably.

• Cable hits, such as The Shield, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy and The Walking Dead, did not lead to similarly themed successes.

So, what are the lessons we should learn from Empire’s success?

First, here’s what it doesn’t tell us.  It does not mean that viewers are looking for shows with more diverse casts (even though that may be true).  It does not mean that viewers want more shows about hip-hop or the music industry.  It does not mean viewers are looking for another Empire.

It means exactly the same thing that all the other hit shows mentioned above meant.  Viewers are looking for well-written, innovative shows, with great casts who gel, and isn’t just a clone of something they’ve seen before.

As is usually the case, most hits come as a surprise (unless it’s another NCIS or CSI).  The next Empire is right around the corner, but we won’t know it until after it debuts.  It’s one of the things that make this business at once so exhilarating and exasperating.

Glee: A Once Great Show Ends With Little Fanfare

I remember when I went to the FOX upfront presentation in 2009, and saw the Glee cast and pilot for the first time.  It was one of those moments every now and then when you have that thrill, and know you are seeing something special.

Watching the series finale this past Friday highlighted both what made the series so great, and how far it had fallen since its stellar second season.

The First Streaming Hit – A Pop Culture Phenomenon

FOX debuted Glee in May 2009 following the season finale of American Idol.  Its initial ratings were modest.  If not for FOX’s brilliant marketing campaign, it might have been one of those failed pilots that just fades from memory.  Over the summer, however, due in part to its memorable rendition of Journey’s pop hit, Don’t Stop Believing, Glee became a pop culture phenomenon, with millions of iTunes and Youtube downloads.  People had access to not only clips from the pilot, but also behind-the-scenes stuff.  Glee was, in a way, the first social-media driven hit TV show.

By the time Glee returned in 4^th Quarter 2009, it was a success, and by the end of its first full season, it was a major hit, averaging roughly 3 1/2 million Adults 18-34, and more than 6 million Adults 18-49 and 25-54 each week.

It was a broad-based hit, not just appealing to its core kids, teens, and Adult 18-24 audience, but to older age groups as well.  This was apparent to anyone who attended a Glee concert, as I did in 2011 with my wife and then 12-year-old son.  The best way to describe it is a combination of a Rolling Stones and a One Direction concert.  It was an event, packed with screaming teenaged girls (and boys), along with their almost as enthusiastic parents.

A Swift and Hard Fall

So what happened?  In the beginning, Glee was a show that highlighted monumentally talented unknowns, who performed often times chills-inducing musical productions every week.  At the same time, it tackled subjects such as bullying, gay teens, and being an outsider in high school in a groundbreaking matter-of-fact style that had never been addressed this way on network television.  Aside from some uneven and silly storylines during its first season, it was fresh, innovative, and at times magical.  And while the message was always an important element of the series, it never overshadowed the show.  The show was always the thing.

When the message starts to be the show, however, viewers notice, and many start to leave.   I was trying to figure out how best to describe why the audience started to rapidly decline starting in Season 3 (without offending any particular group).  I asked my 15-year-old son and former Glee watcher how he would describe it.  Without missing a beat he said, “It went from being a great FOX show to being an ABC Family show.  The people who like ABC Family probably still watch it.  People who like FOX left in the middle of the third or fourth season.”

In fact, during Glee’s third season, ratings fell from the heights of the year before, but were still on par with the show’s first season numbers.  By 4^th Quarter 2011, however, while ratings were holding up OK among the under-25 set, the 25-49 and older audience were leaving in droves.  By 2012, two-thirds of Glee’s 2010 Adult 18-49 audience was gone.

Combined with a change of the show’s focus, as original cast members graduated, it was difficult to catch lightning in the same bottle twice.  New cast members might have been talented, but they had nowhere near the charisma or chemistry of their predecessors, and did not click with viewers.  Some of the segments during the last couple of seasons, particularly those featuring Lea Michele (Rachel), Naya Rivera (Santana) and Chris Colfer (Kurt) were spectacular.  But the series had changed and it had already lost too much of its audience.

The series finale, which showed many scenes from the first season, was a reminder of how great Glee once was.  That Glee will be missed.

C3 or C7: Does it Really Matter?

Often times, new and ostensibly improved research makes people think they are getting closer to the “truth” when they are actually getting farther away.  C3 is a good example. 

Those of us who were involved in the initial industry meetings that led to C3 as a compromise between buyers who wanted Live only and sellers who wanted C7, remember that Nielsen did very little research into the methodology it decided to use in calculating this new metric.  Part of the reason was that the upfront was approaching, the industry needed to deal with the growing impact of DVRs, and C3 was designed as a one-year transition (two at most) until the industry post-buy systems, Donovan and Datatech (since merged to form Media Ocean), were able to report and post on exact minute ratings.

I wrote about how C3 did not take fast-forwarding through commercials into account, which, at the time, Nielsen acknowledged, and most people in the industry should have been fully aware.  But again, since C3 was planned as a temporary measure, and DVR was penetration was barely in 20% of TV homes, it wasn't a priority to fix this.

I remember saying at the time that once C3 was implemented, it would become the standard metric, and it would be difficult to move to something else, since neither agencies or networks really wanted to deal with the nightmare workload involved in actually switching to minute-by-minute ratings on a massive scale – particularly after dealing with the one-year nightmare involved in just switching to C3 (anyone who worked in an agency TV research department back then knows what I mean).

I’ve been part of a few industry meetings since, then where the topic of individual commercial or commercial pod ratings (my choice) were discussed. But there never seems to be any follow-up.

Those of us who remember when cable was posted based on quarter-hour program ratings should realize that this data was significantly closer to actual commercial ratings than are C3 ratings (simply as a result of the way programs build or lose audiences over the course of a telecast).  C3, which merely weight-averages minutes that contain commercials based on how many seconds of commercial time are contained in each minute, is not necessarily close to any individual commercial rating.

Over the past few years, for some reason, a lot of people started to think that C3 accounts for fast-forwarding through commercials.  It doesn’t.  This has to do with the way Nielsen measures the average minute.  Basically, they look for the plurality of time viewed to determine whether a channel is counted as being viewed for that minute.  In other words, if during a given program minute, you are tuned to ABC for 20 seconds, and four other networks for 10 seconds each, you are counted by Nielsen as watching ABC for the full minute. 

When you are playing back something on DVR, however, there is only one channel.  So any viewing to that channel, even just a few seconds, is a plurality, and will count as watching the entire minute.  This will typically only impact the first and last minute of a commercial pod, but it obviously leads to C3 counting a significant amount of fast-forwarding as commercial viewing.

Switching to C7 would not change much in terms of how far away we are from actual commercial measurement, and since it gives a better indication of overall program viewing, there’s no reason not to go with C7.  Any research analysis of time-shifted viewing should be done on a full-week basis anyway.  The difference between C3 and C7 ratings for most cable networks is insignificant.  It is greater for the broadcast networks, which have a lot more original scripted series, and therefore much more time-shifted viewing. 

Does Live Viewing Still Matter?

In today’s C3, multl-screen, video streaming media environment, does live viewing still matter?

The short answer is yes.  The long answer is yes, yes, yes, and yes.

While headlines persist about the demise of traditional TV, the simple fact remains that (according to the latest Nielsen data) the time people spend watching television on a television set is more than twice the total time spent on the internet, social media, smartphones, game consoles, dvd/blu-rays, and multi-media devices combined. So understanding the dynamics of this viewing and its impact on advertising effectiveness is still extremely important.

My wife and I often go to the movies with our 16-year-old son.  A routine has developed that invariably repeats itself.  Prior to the movie, they air several commercials, none of which my wife or I have seen before.  My son, however, is quite familiar with them, often singing along to a jingle.  When I say I never saw any of those commercials, he turns to me and says, “Yes, I know, you never watch commercials anymore. You DVR everything and fast-forward through the ads.”  My son, as usual, is correct.  My wife and I time-shift much of our primetime viewing.  We seldom watch the commercials – maybe only during the 20% or so of the time we are watching something live – usually sports, news, late night, award shows, or off-network series on cable (such as The Big Bang Theory).

Over the past several years, there have been sea changes in what people can watch on television or video, how they can watch, when they can watch, even at what speed and on what platform they can watch.   Yet the since the 1960s, when three broadcast networks accounted for more than 90% of all TV viewing, the way Nielsen measures the average minute audience has not evolved much at all.

In that pre-remote-control era, when it took a minute or so for someone to get off the couch, walk across the room and change the channel, it didn’t really matter how Nielsen chose to measure the average minute.  Minutes were simply averaged up to the program rating, and no one thought about any potential need for more granular data.

Today, you can switch channels more than a dozen times in a minute, and half the country has at least one DVR (and most DVR playback involves some fast-forwarding through commercials).  Current audience measurement used as marketplace currency is simply not equipped to pick up all of this activity.

Despite misleading labels like “commercial minute ratings” and “C3,” Nielsen does not measure commercial or commercial pod ratings. Since Nielsen does not measure individual commercials, it obviously cannot measure the viewers who are fast-forwarding through those commercials.  C3 does average minutes that contain commercials up to three days after the initial broadcast, but the methodology used can significantly over-state commercial exposure during playback.

Amidst all the talk about moving from C3 to C7, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that knowing the percentage of live viewing remains the only way to know who is not fast-forwarding through commercials.

I recently conducted a study that compared live and DVR viewers. It showed nearly identical engagement with the programs being viewed. But live viewers had about a 3x greater recall of specific brand messages than did those who viewed programming via DVR playback.

I’ve been analyzing live viewing by network for several years now.  Looking at November 2014 data for the top 30 rated cable networks among Adults 18-49, the top 10 based on percent live viewing were, Adult Swim, Nick-at-Nite, ION, TV Land, TNT, BET, ID, ABC Family, TBS, and HGTV.  These were also the only networks to have at least 90% of their Adult 18-49 audience live. The ranking will change slightly depending on the time period examined, but the top 4 are almost always the same.

Live viewing matters not simply for the timeliness of viewers seeing a campaign, but equally as important, to minimize commercial avoidance and maximize brand message recall.

Assessing Audience Value in the Age of Time-Shifting and Binge Viewing

Attracting loyal viewers who watch your commercials.  There’s not much more an advertiser can ask of a network.

 Five years ago, when I was working as a consultant, I developed the Commercial Value Index, which was designed to rank cable networks in terms of which were best at minimizing commercial avoidance among their viewers. 

 
The impetus for this stemmed from my frustrations when I was on the media agency side of the business.  I would sit through numerous upfront presentations every year, and there would invariably be a handful of cable networks that tried to sell me on some sort of value factors that went beyond just the Nielsen ratings.  In some cases they would come up with some nifty new name for their viewers based on psychographic or custom research to explain why their audience was better than everyone else’s.

 While some of these were interesting, most were fundamentally flawed, and not viable for measuring viewer involvement, engagement, or activation on any current or ongoing basis.  Creating a static audience picture from six months or a year ago is not particularly useful in a world where a network’s programming is often in a continual state of flux.

 So what I tried to do was develop a better set of value factors that could be objectively used at any point during the season to evaluate all cable networks.  There are a few attributes I believe are essential for developing actionable value factors:

• The measurement should focus both on program engagement and minimizing commercial avoidance (i.e., channel switching and fast-forwarding).

• The data should be transparent.  One should be able to provide the analysis to support how the factors were derived.

• The results should be easily replicated.  A buyer, planner, or researcher should be able to do the analysis at any time during the year, covering any period of time, daypart, or demo (using current data).

• Ideally, the factors should be based on marketplace currency data to avoid a claim that the value factors are based on metrics some people don’t believe in or use.

 Here are the factors I would use:

 
Holding Power:  The amount of time the average viewer spends per viewing session.  Some refer to this as Length of Tuning.  The longer viewers are tuned to a network, the more likely they are to be exposed to the commercial.  Less channel switching means greater viewer involvement with the program. This data is available from Nielsen’s NPower system.

 Live Viewing:  With DVR penetration at around 50 percent of U.S. TV households (higher for demos under 50), commercial avoidance via fast-forwarding is more common than ever.  Nielsen cannot fully measure this phenomenon (C3 misses a substantial amount of fast forwarding).  Aside from minimizing channel switching, the best way to minimize commercial avoidance is to maximize the percentage of live viewing.  This is calculated by dividing the Live Rating by the Live+7 Rating. I’ve conducted research that shows live viewers’ recall commercial brand messages at nearly three times the rate of viewers who watch TV via DVR playback.

 Viewer Loyalty:  There are a number of potential measures of viewer loyalty.  I chose looking at the percentage of a network’s audience that watches 10 or more hours of the network per month.  This gets rid of the surfers and browsers, and hones in on viewers who watch more than just one or two programs – the most loyal (regular) viewers.  This data is available through NPower.

 Each category is ranked independently, and the ranks are straight averaged, along with the C3 rating rank for whatever demo you are analyzing, to provide a composite ranking (of course, anyone who wants to provide more weight to one category can easily do so). 

 Other categories important to any specific advertiser can be added, whether from such syndicated research data as TiVo, Nielsen Catalina, MRI, etc., or some proprietary database, but these three elements, Holding Power, Live Viewing, and Viewer Loyalty, should always be included in the mix when analyzing television.  They are foundational to maximizing commercial exposure.

 I don’t include the broadcast networks because they are significantly higher rated than cable networks, and as a result have significantly higher viewer loyalty levels.  And because of the far greater original scripted series loads, will have significantly lower rates of live viewing.  It is designed primarily for cable networks because their audience levels are generally in such a narrow range – for Adults 18-49 and 25-54, for example, less than half a rating point typically separates the top-30 rated general entertainment networks.

 As an example, looking at November 2014, the composite ranking of the top-20 cable networks combining C3 ratings, Holding Power, Live Viewing, and Viewer Loyalty were, Adult Swim, Nick-at-Nite, ION, ESPN, ID, Hallmark, TBS, USA, History, Food, BET, HGTV, TV Land, A&E, AMC, ABC Family, TNT, FX, Fox News, and Discovery.

How to Fix the Academy Awards Broadcast

As I was watching this year’s Academy Awards broadcast, I had to ask myself, is it this excruciatingly boring every year?  Then I remembered – I asked myself the same question last year.  

 Many reviews have already been written focusing on the length of the show (3 hours, 38 minutes), the weak material, and the lack of diversity among the nominees (and the theater audience), the acceptance speeches (some stirring, some rambling), the songs (some stirring, some rambling), and the presenters (some stirring, some rambling).

 So rather than focus on those things, I want to discuss the actual structure of the show, which seems designed to minimize ratings and lose a whole generation of viewers.  I know it might be strange to say that about a program that is traditionally the highest rated non-sports event on television, but that may not be always the case if some relatively simple changes are not made.

 
Part of the problem is that the Academy Awards are geared for Hollywood insiders, not the television viewing public.  The first award presented was Best Supporting Actor.  After that, not counting the intermittent songs, clips, and routines, the following awards were presented over the next two hours or so – the period when primetime viewing is ordinarily at its peak:  Costume Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, Foreign Language Film, Live Action Short, Documentary Short Subject, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing.  Then we finally got Best Supporting Actress, followed by Visual Effects, Animated Short Film, Animated Feature Film, Production Design, Cinematography, Film Editing, Documentary Feature, Original Song, and Original Score. 

 I got bored just writing this list.

At 11:10pm there was an announcement that “Lady Gaga is up next, and later, the awards for Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Picture.” Later! 

 The rehearsals must have revealed that Lady Gaga’s Sound of Music tribute was spectacular. Why keep it near the end of the telecast?  It could have been moved up front and gotten people pumped from the get go.

 The show started at 8:30pm EST, and the traditional primetime daypart was now over, and the major awards had not yet been announced.

 The last 20-30 minutes of the telecast, when the major awards are presented, are typically not even rated by Nielsen.  This is because Nielsen only provides national ratings up to the last national commercial, and the last 20 minutes or so contain only local commercials. 

 It never made sense to me to hold back the major awards for the end of the show – particularly since that is always post-11pm on a school night.  My 15-year-old son got bored and left after about 20 minutes, so this is just one way they are driving away the next generation of viewers.  It’s interesting to note that in the past 10 years the median age of the broadcast rose from 47 to 54.

 There was a time (pre-1990s), when it probably seemed logical to hold back the major awards as a way to keep viewers tuned in.  But in today’s media world, with countless other award shows, and pundits talking about the Oscars for weeks on end, there is less doubt than ever about who will likely win each award.  There are also so many viewing choices out there, that many people probably don’t even tune in until after primetime because they know they won’t miss the big four awards. In addition, social media often keeps people tuned in.  Had the major awards been spread out over the entire telecast, Twitter, Facebook, and the like would have probably seen significantly more Oscar-related activity, and kept more people tuned in and discussing the show.

 Now, I’m not saying they should give the non-major awards short shrift, but the pace of the show and the ratings would improve dramatically if they simply spaced out the major awards throughout the show, and gave enough time to celebrate each.

 Here’s how I would do it:

 After the opening, which even this year was pretty good, present Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress.

 Then present a major award every 45 minutes.  For Best Actor, Actress, and Picture, precede the award presentation with three-minute clips of each nominee – this will provide a better picture of each performance and greater anticipation for each award.  While showing the clips, they could even give viewers a chance to vote online or by phone, and then show their choices online at the end of the show to see how they compare to the actual winners.    Each clip series – Best Actor, Actress, and Picture - can be sponsored by a different advertiser.

 At 9pm present Best Director.  At 9:45 present Best Actor. At 10:30 present Best Actress. At 11:15 present Best Picture.

 The show will flow better, it won’t be nearly as boring, and ratings will improve.

Listen Up Networks and Marketers: I'm Not My Father

Three years ago, ago I wrote an article on my blog and for Mediapost, that received a tremendous amount of positive feedback.   I think it is worth re-running every few years. Here’s a revised and updated version.

I recently turned 55.  In the real world, this was not a notable occasion.  No one threw me a surprise birthday party, and I did not feel I had just reached a major milestone in my life.  In the world of marketing, media, and advertising, however, it was a birthday of great significance.

After aging out of the mythical 18-49 age group five years earlier, I now aged out of the 25-54 demographic and into the dreaded and nebulous 55+ demographic.  All of a sudden entire categories of products were no longer being marketed to me.  If I happened to be there, OK, but I was no longer part of the target audience.

What happened when I hit that magical age that changed how so many marketing and media executives see me? 

I’m now 58.  I have more disposable income than ever.  I still watch lots of TV, go to lots of movies, and buy lots of stuff.  I take at least one major vacation with my family every year, and several smaller ones – my wife and I still travel for business.  I still use numerous mobile devices, subscribe to Netflix and Hulu Plus, and spend a fair amount of time every day on Facebook and Instagram.  I still play games with my 15-year-old son on Playstation 4 and Xbox 360 (and buy most of the games).  My son and I have several collections, from sneakers to Pop Vinyls, and my wife and I have several different collections that we spend a reasonable amount of money on every year.


I continue to try new brands (at least those that acknowledge I exist).

Most media and marketing executives, however, now see me as though I’m part of my father’s generation, with the media and buying habits he displayed when he was approaching 60.  I am not.  Ignore me and those like me at your own risk.

Some things to consider:

My dad grew up during the depression and its immediate aftermath.  I grew up during the 1960s and ‘70s, during the heart of the middle-class Baby Boom generation.  The way we relate to money and buying things we want (rather than just need) are dramatically different.

When I was growing up, my parents friends were mostly within a narrow age range.  Virtually all of them were married to their first spouses, and had kids who were around my age.  Life stage didn’t mean anything when measuring media audiences because people of a certain age were usually in the same life stage.

Today, I have friends my age, some of whom have kids the same age as my 15-year-old son, some of whom have kids that have graduated from college, some with no kids, some who are married, other who are divorced or never married.  I also have friends 15 or 20 years younger than me with kids the same age as mine.  In other words, I have friends in many different life-stages, with age not being the major determining factor it would have been 30 or 40 years ago.

Whose media and buying habits are closer to my own?  When it comes to music, probably someone closer to my age.  When it comes to movie attendance, streaming or downloads, how much I text, my video game usage, or a whole host of other activities, there are likely more similarities to younger parents with kids the same age a mine.

My TV viewing habits are probably somewhere in the middle. I love the NCIS’s, Criminal Minds, and shows like The Blacklist (which might fit my age profile), but I also love The Walking Dead, The Flash, The Simpsons, and the recently ended Sons of Anarchy, which Nielsen would tell you have much younger age profiles.

The bottom line is that I’m part of a completely different generation from my father, with a different mindset, different experiences, different media access, and different spending habits.  Advertisers, marketers, and networks should take note.

About eight years ago, when I was on the Council for Research Excellence (CRE), I was co-chair of its Media Consumption and Engagement Committee with my colleague, Sharianne Brill.  We helped spearhead the CRE’s landmark Video Consumer Mapping Study, which dubbed 45-54 year-olds “Digital Boomers.”  This group tended to be heavy TV viewers, similar to the next older age group (55-64), but used computers and mobile devices more closely to the next younger age group (35-44).  Many of these Digital Boomers are now 55-64, and are vastly different from their parents at a similar age.

In today’s media world, life stage should trump age/sex demographics, but if advertisers and marketers insist on continuing with current demographic metrics, 45-64 (or 35-64) should be the sweet spot.  Two of the best research minds in the business, CBS’s Dave Poltrack and NBC’s Alan Wurtzel, have been talking about this topic for years.  As usual, they are correct.

I’d love to see the CRE update the Video Consumer Mapping Study.  At the time, we said it would be good to update every five years.  Today’s media world is so dramatically different from when the CRE began analyzing this stuff, it would be fascinating to see the new study’s results.