Pundits predict the end for network television. Broadcasters wring their hands over what went wrong. Why such angst? This season, it looks as if young male viewers are fleeing broadcast TV en masse.
Or are they? That’s the question that has the TV industry engaged in an orgy of contentious debate over Nielsen numbers, demographic subgroups and what guys really want.
Fact: Network viewership across the board has been declining for years in the face of increased competition from cable, satellite, pay-per-view, DVDs, video gaming and other entertainment media. Just this season, audiences for ABC, CBS and NBC are down an average of 10 percent. (Fox alone is up, thanks to high-rated baseball playoffs.)
Cable, meanwhile, has continued to grow and topped broadcast for the first time in the 2002-03 season, when the Big Four networks’ share of the total TV audience fell to 47 percent.
But the statistic that sparked the current uproar is the 7 percent drop in viewership by men 18-34 years old, as reported to clients by Nielsen Media Research.
Seven percent might not sound like an alarming figure. But as media analyst Shari Anne Brill of Carat USA points out, “Young men are elusive anyway. They don’t watch much television, and they’re hard for advertisers to reach.” Young men thus represent a much-coveted audience demographic in which a decline in viewing could cost the networks millions of dollars.
Advertisers love young men because they typically haven’t settled into family life yet and have plenty of disposable income. At the same time, both men and women in their early 20s are making all sorts of buying decisions, from automobiles to laundry detergents, for the first time and so are considered particularly susceptible to commercial pitches.
Once upon a time, reaching a broad spectrum of TV viewers was easy. In the 1960s and ’70s, with just three networks sharing most of the viewing pie, a hit like “Bonanza” routinely drew a 50 percent slice; now, “ER” and “CSI” are happy with 25 percent shares.
Despite the continuing slide in dominance, network television remains a $60 billion business, and advance advertising sales for the current season reached record levels. Even a hit show on cable – where viewership is sliced into slivers – still can’t deliver a network-size audience.
The broadcast networks find themselves pinched, however, when they fail to draw as many viewers as they guaranteed to advertisers. The remedy is givebacks, in which the networks have to dip into their pockets and return a percentage of ad dollars.
That’s a big reason the reported drop in viewership by young men set off so many alarm bells. For the first five weeks of the current season, all young adults (those 18-34 years old) watched less network TV than they did last year, Nielsen found. But the drop was steepest for the youngest men, the 18-24 set, whose viewership was reported down 10 percent (and at some points as much as 20 percent).
The networks responded to the Nielsen figures by disputing them. David Poltrack, CBS’ research chief, called the drop “some form of anomaly that should correct itself.” NBC’s Alan Wurtzel suggested that a change in Nielsen’s sample to add more Hispanic viewers had skewed the results.
Nielsen, in turn, stuck by its numbers and began preparing a report for its clients to prove that its methodology wasn’t flawed.
The networks have often found themselves at odds with Nielsen, which has a monopoly on providing ratings information – especially when its findings don’t make them look good.
“The Nielsen system has never been complete,” notes Brill, vice president of programming for the media-buying firm Carat, which advises clients on placement of advertising dollars. Nielsen “was set up to measure viewership in the household, and many of those between 18 and 24 are away at school from September to May.”
Nielsen doesn’t wire college dorms, fraternity houses or other collective housing with electronic People Meters, which provide the service’s core measurements. (Other figures are gathered from hand-written diaries distributed across the country during sweeps periods.)
But Brill believes that by focusing on possible Nielsen flaws, broadcasters may be denying a growing problem: that network television is doing a poor job of satisfying the needs of viewers, particularly younger ones.
“People have so many choices in entertainment today,” she says. Instead of watching television, young men are spending more time online – 22 hours a week, as against 15 hours watching TV, according to a study by the Online Publishers Association. Video-game usage is also up.
“But it’s been proven that viewers of all ages return to TV when there’s programming of interest to them,” Brill says, noting that ratings for ESPN were up 23 percent in October over last year and that MTV suffered no loss of viewership.
Spike TV, which targets young male viewers specifically with shows like the animated “Stripperella,” has even been running ads in trade publications suggesting that advertisers turn to them to reach the missing males.
Young men (and women as well) are turning away from the broadcast networks because this season’s new shows offer nothing for them, Brill believes.
As Steve Sternberg, who analyzes audiences for Magna Global USA, put it: “It’s the programming, stupid.” Or, as NBC Entertainment president Jeff Zucker controversially confessed to an industry gathering, the fall season flopped because some of NBC’s programs “just sucked.”
High-profile fall failures include NBC’s British import “Coupling,” the Alicia Silverstone comedy-drama “Miss Match” and Fox’s heavily promoted “Skin.”
But returning shows, including “The Next Joe Millionaire” on Fox, have also faltered. Among men 18-24, even “Friends” is down 30 percent this season.
“Young viewers want something different,” Brill says. “They have short attention spans, they get tired of things fast, and they move on. It’s not as if there’s a real breakthrough hit this season for any demographic. But in particular, no cutting-edge shows have even attempted to go after younger viewers.”
“If “Joan of Arcadia’ is a hit for CBS, that’s not so much because it’s a great show, although I like it, as because it’s different from anything else on television,” Brill says. “The forensics shows and “Law & Orders’ are popular, but every one begins to seem just like every other one, and that doesn’t do it for a lot of young viewers.”
But viewers of all ages will come back for good programs, Brill believes, asking, “Why did the “Andy Griffith Show’ reunion draw 22 million viewers to become the No. 2 rated show of the week?”
As the argument over network TV’s vanishing young men continued, the missing males began to come back – or, at least, the Nielsen numbers started stabilizing. A similar thing happened early in the 1998-99 season, when young viewers seemed to drift away and then come back, possibly because of a measurement hiccup, observers point out.
“The imminent demise of the broadcast networks has been greatly exaggerated,” Brill says. But she believes that to stay viable, the networks may have to change, even to become more like cable channels that focus on particular niches.
“They have to define who they are, make themselves more of a brand and then stick with it.”
Perhaps even more important, the networks need to remember that nothing counts more in attracting viewers of any age than brilliant writing and great storytelling.
“If you program it,” Brill says, “and it’s great, they will come.”
—
(c) 2003, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Visit the Post-Dispatch on the World Wide Web at http://www.stltoday.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
AP-NY-11-28-03 0620EST
Send questions/comments to the editors.
