Is 18-49 Passé As Top Demographic?

By all rights, Nevada state Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie should be celebrating life.

A four-term legislator, successful district court administrator, and Nov. 6 is her birthday!

Her 50th birthday.

And that, explains correspondent Jerry Bowen on CBS News Sunday Morning, is the problem.

In some eyes, Leslie no longer exists.

She tells Bowen, "I think I do feel somewhat invisible, and I hear it gets worse the older that you get."

That's because Leslie has just left that much wooed, highly pursued 18-to-49-year-old demographic group, the younger crowd that advertisers covet, and television networks program to please.

"It seems that 50's a very arbitrary line," Leslie observes. "One day, you're 49, the next day, you're 50, but you're the same person. … Looking toward 50, it's an era of my life where I kind of have things figured out. I have more disposable income, more time on my hands in order to try new things. So it, it does seem odd that 50 is the cutoff."

"When you turn 50 in this country," says Marty Kaplan, media analyst and associate dean of USC's Annenberg School of Communication, "you might as well have put a burka on and completely disappeared under the veil. Programmers have no interest in you.

"In fact, some programs are positively 50-plus averse. If you have statistics that show you are watched by that demographic, it's like kryptonite to advertisers. They don't want to be uncool. The notion that one day is a knife edge between cool and uncool, between consumer and Alzheimer's, is ridiculous."

But, says Bowen, it's long been the reality for those who make and sell commercials, based on the belief that the 18 to 49 year old population, some 120 million Americans, is where the money is. Advertisers also believe younger viewers are more impressionable, more susceptible to advertising, and more willing than their parents to try new things.

"Advertisers want to reach a young audience early, and then hopefully lock them into brands. And hopefully hook them for life," remarks Kelly Kahl, CBS senior executive vice president for programming and operations. He's part of the inner-circle that decides which shows live or die on the network; which shows are likely to draw that audience coveted by advertisers.

"I think a lot of it is just simply institutional," Kahl reflects. "Back when people-meters in the early 80's came out, advertisers were able to actually see not just how many people were watching, but who was watching. … They were able to target shows that reached a younger audience. And they've been funneling their dollars that way ever since."

Bowen says the idea that the 18-to-49-year-olds represented the most valuable demographic was the creation of the then last-place ABC network back in the 1970s. Unable to win the overall audience, ABC sold what it had, younger viewers, and 'the demo,' as it's called, became the gold standard for advertisers and all network programmers.

"They called us the geezer network," at the time, recalls CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves.

When Moonves made his annual pitch to ad buyers last spring, he crowed that CBS, long known for its older viewers, could deliver younger viewers, too: the 18-to-49 demo."What makes this an historic year for us," Moonves beams, "is that, for the first time in three decades in regularly scheduled programming, CBS is now in first place in adults 18-49. … That's right: 18-49, the demo the other guys said was the only one that mattered. Who woulda thought?"

"All advertisers covet this younger demographic," says New York advertising executive Brad Adgate of Horizon Media, "and I think the networks are just trying to go out and get these young viewers."

The reason, he says, is that younger viewers are hard to find. They watch two hours less TV a day than the over-50 crowd: "They're going to movies. They're playing video games. … They're listening to their iPods, and so on and so forth. … So, if a broadcast network can prove that they can get somebody in their 20's and 30's, they're going to generate a lot more revenue under the business model of television."

How much more revenue?

Take "The Simpsons," Bowen suggests. The show ranked 68th in total viewers last season, according to Nielsen Media Research. But the median age of a Simpsons viewer is only 29, much younger than most primetime shows. The result: the Fox network can charge more for a 30 second commercial than half of this year's top ten shows get.

And it's not just the big networks.

"A cable network like MTV, which is not necessarily the highest rated cable network, gets a much higher rate for their advertising because their core viewers are teens and young adults," says Adgate.

But, Bowen points out, there is a growing body of evidence, study upon study, that indicates the business model of television is wrong; that if advertisers really want to reach consumers with the most money to spare and spend, they need to aim older. They need to go after the 77 million-strong baby boomer generation, more than half of whom are in their fifties.

"You know," Adgate comments, "an American turns 50 every 7 seconds. And you know, they do have a lot of money."

"But," says CBS' Kahl, "Madison Avenue hasn't moved along with the baby boomers. They have the most disposable income. They control over a trillion dollars of discretionary income every year. But Madison Avenue has not really moved along with it."

It hasn't gone unnoticed, Bowen notices: The AARP began running magazine ads in an effort to draw attention to what it sees as demographic discrimination.

"These days," the ads say, "doctors don't pronounce you dead, marketers do."

"You're either 18-to-49, or you're dead to most marketers," says Matt Thornhill, president of The Boomer Project, a marketing research and consulting firm in Richmond, Va. "You don't exist. Or if you exist at all, you exist to wear denture adhesive or to drive a Cadillac. And that's about it."

He says the assumption that the over-50 crowd has rigidly-set buying patterns that advertisers can't influence is a myth: "Boomers are, as a group, less brand-loyal than younger consumers. So there's plenty of opportunity for increased sales and increased business by continuing to target this segment. They are a long way from dying."

Still, notes Bowen, the 50-and-older crowd that accounts for fully half of all discretionary spending is the focus of just 10 percent of all advertising. And, if change is coming, it's coming very slowly.

"If suddenly 50-plus of advertisers paid a premium to reach 50-plus," says Adgate, "you'll see the networks start to put on shows, more and more shows like "The Golden Girls."

That was a popular '80s sitcom about four retired women.

Asked by Bowen if, in this day and age, he would green-light a program like "The Golden Girls," Kahl responded, "If we thought there was a chance we could get some younger viewers as well, we would certainly do it. But in this day and age, it would be tough."

Says Annenberg's Kaplan, "Any programmer at any network who wants to put on a show that doesn't have an obvious appeal to 18-to-49 might as well submit their resignation."

And what does birthday girl Sheila Leslie think?

Not surprisingly, this brand new 50-year-old believes the network programmers, especially, need to rethink what they're doing.

"Maybe," she remarks, "it's backwards that they're hearing what the advertisers say and gearing their programs to that younger group of people, when they really should be switching it around and aiming more toward people in their 50's."

People, Bowen says, just like Sheila Leslie, who is not going willingly, or quietly, into the invisible age.