From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
The Young and the Pointless
Advertisers target the wrong age group.
As America heads out to shop this last weekend before Christmas, the tube is packed with come-ons. There are pitches for plasma-screen TVs, Cat-In-The-Hat this-and-that, luxury cars and Old Navy half-zip performance fleece pullovers. Given the mark-ups on big-ticket items sold to wealthy adults, you'd think that TV shows with affluent older demographics would command the priciest ad slots. You'd think wrong.
In one crucial regard, for advertisers Christmas is no different from the rest of the year: They want to be where the boys are. Advertisers are willing to pay a steep premium to show their wares to young men (and women) in the "all-important," "coveted," "highly desirable"--choose your adjective--18-to-34 age group. Imagine the consternation last month when the networks got the latest Nielsen ratings. Nielsen couldn't really say where the boys were, but where they weren't was watching network TV. NBC's youth flagship "Friends" lost nearly 30% of its young-adult viewers over the past year; Fox's "24" plunged 37% among the age group. The networks accused Nielsen of slipshod research; Nielsen replied that it knew how to count.
You can't blame network execs for their distress. Advertisers regularly pay more than twice as much to air commercials on shows that deliver the youth market. The question is: Why? You'd think they would follow Willie Sutton's motto and go where the money is. And when it comes to selling stuff--especially expensive stuff--the money is in the pockets of consumers over 45.
Blindly chasing the young is a marketing mistake as costly as it is inexplicable. Take Mitsubishi Motors' recent efforts to woo young car buyers. The company's signature ad featured a loose-limbed girl in a Babe Ruth hat sitting in the passenger seat of an Eclipse. In dreamy slow motion she grooves to a robotic techno-ditty.
The ads were cleverly cool. But to actually sell cars to the target market, Mitsubishi had to offer easy credit: nothing down, no interest and no payments until, well, whenever. It seems that Mitsubishi didn't ask if the rave crowd--once it had covered the monthly nut for Ecstasy and glow-sticks--would have much left over for car payments. In just six months this year, Mitsubishi lost nearly a half-billion dollars in loans gone bad.
It's not as though advertisers haven't been warned. Back in 1997, Melanie Wells and David Lieberman penned an article in USA Today that exposed the flimsy thinking behind the youth-advertising premium. And then last year, in the New York Times Magazine, novelist Jonathan Dee wrote a devastating critique titled "The Myth of '18 to 34.' " But the myth goes on. Mitsubishi had to lose its shirt to be persuaded to "retool" its sales pitch to a more "mature" buyer. It will take a little longer to retool its product. In the meantime, the company is left trying to put soccer moms into bright-yellow pocket-rockets straight off the set of "The Fast and the Furious."
Why should we care if advertisers have been duped into paying extra for teenage eyeballs? Because it's one big reason that so much of the dial--and the broader culture--is filled with dreck. "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," writes Jonathan Dee. "It is the principle by which a great deal of our popular culture--not just TV, but music, movies, radio--comes into existence." Take away the unearned premium demanded by shows that skew young and there might be more room for entertainments that aren't embarrassing to grown-ups.
Advertisers have their reasons for targeting teens and 20-somethings. First among them is the belief that long-term brand loyalties are set when people are young and impressionable. The problem is that the belief is based on market research that is 40 years out of date. "It's a cliché and a fallacy to think you can build a customer for life," says Al Ries, a longtime New York ad exec who is now a marketing consultant in Atlanta. "As people grow up, they change brands."
Or as Andrew Cracknell puts it: "The belief that once you get a customer they're yours for life is complete bollocks." Mr. Cracknell is creative director of the European ad agency Bates. He is mulling starting a new agency to be called "Long Trousers," aimed at consumers who've grown out of short pants.
And who've grown out of brands, too. People don't just drift from brand to brand. As they get older they go out of their way to reject brands they once embraced, brands they now associate with their less sophisticated, former selves. When a young woman heads off for college, chances are that she isn't going to plaster her dorm room with the boy-band posters that used to decorate her walls at home. Just because the Backstreet Boys had a robust teen following doesn't mean that the Backstreet Boys brand built customers for life.
Over the course of her college career that same young woman may well drink countless kegs of Milwaukee's Best at frat parties. But once she has a job in the big city, she isn't likely to fill her fridge with cheap beer. And while our friend is paying off her student loans, she might gladly buy a Chevrolet Cavalier. But that hardly means GM has a lock on her. "When a guy gets promoted, he doesn't get a more expensive Chevy," says Mr. Ries. "He buys a BMW."
The "customer for life" cliché isn't the only blunder behind advertisers' youth fixation. Mr. Cracknell tells of a gin brand he worked for that would panic every few years when research showed the average age of its customers to be 50. They were acting on the "my customers are all about to die" fallacy, which leads companies to look for replacement customers on the playground. (This strategy may work for cigarette manufacturers, but is not widely applicable otherwise.)
A few years ago the Chicago Symphony commissioned a survey that found the average age of its concert-goers to be 55. But the orchestra's president, Henry Fogel, didn't fall for the actuarial fallacy. Instead he checked similar research done 30 years earlier and found that the average age at that time was also 55. "There is simply a time in one's life when subscribing to a symphony orchestra becomes both desirable and possible," says Mr. Fogel, now president of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Acting on this insight, the Chicago Symphony is wooing boomers who, though they may still enjoy their old Beatles records, long for a new musical experience. The orchestra has targeted new subscribers by advertising on, of all places, a local "classic rock" station.
Still, it's hard to believe that outmoded assumptions and outright superstition are causing companies to waste billions of advertising dollars. You'd think such a colossal error would present a market opportunity. So where are all the savvy corporate executives that market theory tells us should be lining up to exploit this mistaken pricing? Andrew Cracknell has a blunt answer: "Big business's capacity for making mistakes is enormous." Big enough that the long-in-the-tooth fixation on youth just promises to get older and older.
Mr. Felten is a jazz musician in Washington.
