Myth of the "18 to 34" demographic
The New York Times story by Jonathan Dee exposes the myth behind the
...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.
...To be sure, there was a hard-numbers aspect to the initial explosion of youth-targeted advertising in the 1960's and early 70's. By 1966, 48 percent of the U.S. population was under the age of 25. Failure to speak their language meant kissing off half of the market.
But this is not valid any more.
It was a long time before anyone cared to notice that the target demographic itself, and its status in American society, had gone through some profound changes. The population bubble caused by the baby boom kept floating up; whereas in 1940 only 6.8 percent of the population was 65 or older, as of 2000 that number was 12.4 percent. And the economic news wasn't bullish either. Between 1973 and 1990, median real income for families with children headed by persons under 30 fell an amazing 16 percent. And in 1990, three out of four men between the ages of 18 and 24 were still living at home, the largest proportion since the Depression.