Market Research
On Monday, for the first time in a long time, I watched NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams from start to finish at its scheduled time, complete with commercials.
I’m turned off by most advertising to begin with, but I think that the lack of interest among young people in network news can at least partially be attributed to the ads.
Unless I blinked and missed something worthwhile, 100% of the advertisements were for prescription drugs to treat ailments that, God willing, I won’t ever have.
I know market research is designed to help advertisers find programs whose audience fits their target demographic. But what happens when the demographic is targeted so thoroughly that the advertisements make the audience (in this case, me) feels that they shouldn’t be watching this program?
Is there any sort of chicken-and-egg aspect to the fragmenting of the audience (men and sports, old people and news, the educated and PBS), whereby women don’t dislike sports per se, but are simply uninterested in 3+ hours of commercials for beer, fast food, pickup trucks and violent movies?
Either way, it’s back to watching the news online, on my time, and not feeling excluded from a program I enjoy by the bullshit vomited onscreen during the pauses.
December 18th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Hm… perhaps many in our generation have been so busy pursuing our futures and following the evolution of mass media formats that we didn’t notice the commercials were changing to reflect our diverted attention, too!
Our society is definitely good at oversimplifying and categorizing.