The ad community's obsession with youth has led mass media astray

The 1980s and the 1990s are generally referred to as the decades of media fragmentation and media proliferation. Pundits already are labeling the first decade of the new century as the decade of media personalization. The challenge that both newspapers and the broadcast networks face is how to maintain their respective mass-media franchises in this changing media environment.

I define a mass medium as one that attempts to serve all members of the population to some degree. While both newspapers and broadcast networks meet this definition, the proliferation of new, more targeted media has reduced the mass for both of these media. In 1970, more than three-quarters (78 percent) of all adults read a newspaper daily. Today, that readership level is down to 58 percent. In 1970, the three broadcast networks commanded a 90 percent share of the prime-time audience. Today, the four networks command just over half of the prime-time audience (52 percent).

Despite these diminished audiences, both newspapers and the broadcast networks remain true mass media in relative terms. Their daily audiences far surpass those of the other media and continue to draw from all segments of the population. The preservation of their respective mass-media positions is more a question of economics than consumer appeal.

Newspapers have circulation revenue, but their continued vitality is dependent on the growth of advertising. Broadcast networks are almost totally dependent on increased ad revenue for their economic viability. Therefore, the more precise challenge facing both of these mass media is how to garner more advertising dollars in the face of decreasing audiences and increasing competition for the ad dollar from new, more targeted media.

Adding to this challenge is the advertiser’s selective approach to media audiences. It seems that the majority of advertisers are obsessed with reaching the young and the affluent with their advertising messages. This presents mass media with a dilemma. Should they continue to try to serve all audiences or narrow their focus to better serve the population segments that advertisers wish to reach? This dilemma is compounded by the fact that older adults comprise a disproportionately large percentage of newspaper readers and television viewers. With the overall population growing older, this reader and viewer profile is not likely to move in the opposite direction.

Each summer, newspaper columnists who cover television gather at the press tour in Los Angeles, at which time the networks present their schedules for the upcoming television season. This summer, a major theme of that tour was the networks’ collective courting of the young-adult audience. The success of the new WB Network in attracting advertising-dollar premiums for its young audience, despite the small size of that audience relative to that of the established networks, has resulted in an even greater emphasis on youth for all networks, with the exception of CBS.

Many reporters noted that this single-minded focus would serve to further erode the overall audience of the networks. While this was true, it is also true for the newspaper medium.

Television coverage is a major area of interest for newspaper readers, and television reporters focus editorially on youth-oriented programming. During the past television season, the youth-oriented WB programs “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Dawson’s Creek” and “Felicity” were featured in some 1,700 articles in 56 major newspapers. Each of these programs was watched by about 4 million people, or 4 percent of the readers of these newspapers. Two other prime-time programs, “Walker, Texas Ranger” and “ JAG,” were watched by four and three times as many readers, respectively, but received only a fraction of the press coverage, approximately 700 articles each.

In search of advertising gold, both broadcast networks and the nation’s newspapers are focusing too much on the young and the affluent. In doing so, they run the risk of underserving large and growing segments of their respective constituencies. The future of television networks and the nation’s newspapers lies in developing their powerful and respected brand names through the array of new distribution channels opening up to them, not in narrowing their editorial and marketing focus.

Our collective energies are better served demonstrating the value of our vast audiences to advertisers than in jeopardizing those franchises by attempting to meet the misguided demands of Madison Avenue.