It’s a nice peaceful Saturday morning in the SwampSwami household. Time to plan out my day. Laundry? Check – started that already. Lawn to mow? Coming up once the dew clears. And let’s defrost some meats for the grilling today, too!
Ah, yes. Life is sweet as I sip a cup of morning warmth.
Then I turned on the television. Big mistake.
On the sports channel that starts with an “E”, we are now into Day 4 of the 24/7 media drum-beating and oft-times moral hammer-bashing event about Ohio State head football coach, Urban Meyer. As pointed-out in an earlier posting this week, I thought the primary job of the head football coach was to win football games and fill-up the stands and financial coffers of said university. This problem is the university’s decision and certainly not mine.
But I can’t help thinking about a similar situation happening in a major corporation. Would a successful corporate CEO, who earns millions of dollars every year based on his or her job performance on behalf of the stockholders, be fired if a bad apple was found to be on the staff? I seriously doubt it.
UNLESS…the ambulance chasers of the 24/7 media learn about it and descend like a swarm of hungry buzzards on the issue and could somehow create a riveting drama for viewers/listeners/readers.
Turn on today’s “news” channels, and you’ll get something similar. If you were trying to learn about an actual news event like the volcano in Hawaii or fires in Colorado, forget about it. Their drum beat is the President of the United States – love him or hate him (and most media members seem to hate him).
Every day. It’s the same thing nearly 24/7.
For those of us old enough to remember (let’s say age 50 and over), there was a time in America when we had three primary television networks plus PBS and a few indies on UHF so you could watch reruns, wrestling shows, or infomercials for the greatest hits of Slim Whitman.
With such limited viewing options, the networks smartly programmed to the day-part audience. News (local and national) was a small part of the programming day in the 1960’s and 70’s and primarily watched during the breakfast, lunch, and dinner hours. Let’s be generous and say maybe four hours (tops) per day was devoted to news. In other parts of the day, the primary viewing audience wanted to be entertained with other fare.
Sports? You had your local television sports anchor for 3 to 5 minutes during your local 6PM and 10PM newscasts. Otherwise, Saturday and Sunday was time for sports on American television. The network covered the events themselves.
Sports-opinion shows? Nope. Too small of an audience to justify such valuable network time.
What happened?
Technology and more competition for advertising dollars! Cable television hit the scene +/- 1980 bringing (initially) about 20-30 channels of specialty programming for (initially) about $10/month. Many of those channels were filled with specialty programming focused on a single topic. There was a news channel, a sports channel, a weather channel, a business and stock market channel, etc. If you wanted to immerse yourself 24/7 into a particular interest, here was your chance!
But wait! What if the cable operators could offer more channels with even more options? So, for about $30/month, you now had the birth of even more specialty options such as an all-shopping network, a food/cooking network, a music video channel, etc. Isn’t this great?
Of all the traditional media vehicles, radio stations have long understood competition the best. If you want greater advertising revenue, it’s best to program your radio station geared toward the interests of your listeners and, more importantly, their disposable income spending habits.
In some cities, country music is king. So, that’s why a radio station will change its format to become “Bubba 107.9 FM” instead of that oldies station which played your favorites from the 50’s and 60’s. If the king of the local radio market has a 10% audience share and your station is at 1%, your goal is to take half of that top guy’s listeners and zoom up to a 5% market share, right? Hello, Trace Adkins and good-bye Frankie Valli.
Continued improvements in technology for cable and, later, satellite television, began to allow literally hundreds of viewing options to be provided (at a cost of over $100/month in some markets). With it, more competition. If the original news channel is #1 on cable, let’s add a competitor news channel! If sports programming is #2, then let’s add our own sports channel and give ’em a run for the money.
Unfortunately, there’s only so much advertising “pie” available for consumption by the hundreds of new competitors to share and still make a profit.
Just like radio had already learned, television news (and sports) channels began to further segment their programming to capture a small but loyal part of the overall news “pie”. Today’s 24/7 news (and sports) channels have fine-tuned their programming even more to reach a loyal audience with a demographic profile of interest to certain advertisers.
No matter what any of the cable news outlets say, none of them are now or will be “fair and balanced”. They can’t be, or their core audience will immediately change channels. If your advertisers are expecting a certain age/income group to be watching your channel, then you had better program consistently through all day-parts in today’s fragmented media market.
The same goes for the sports channels, too. In order to grab your attention, today’s ambulance chasers in the sports media (television, radio, internet) will grab today’s biggest sports headlines and beat it to death 24/7 for days (Urban Meyer), weeks (NFL’s knee issues) and years (Tiger Woods! LeBron James! Tom Brady!). Why? Because you are interested, paying attention, and, most importantly, will continue watching their channel.
Try turning it off for a few days or a week. It will be there when you decide to come back, but your outlook on life will be happier in the meantime.
Time to get the laundry out of the dryer!