information >>> articlearchive
"Ageless Wonder"
By Sophia Banay
Portfolio.com, June 5, 2008.
© 2008 Condé Nast Inc. All rights reserved. |
|---|
Bart Simpson hasn't aged a day since The Simpsons launched on Fox in 1989.
Neither, it turns out, has its audience, which may explain The Simpsons’ current first-place tie (with Gunsmoke) for the longest-running primetime TV series, ever.
This week, the network announced it would pick up the show, featuring Springfield’s favorite dysfunctional but loving animated family for a 20th season.
The Simpsons’ audience has a current median age of 31.5, and the show ranks among the 10 with the youngest median audiences, which are most appealing to advertisers, at the end of every TV season, according to Brad Adgate, senior vice president at media planning and buying agency Horizon Media. (The youngest median-age shows this year are almost all from Fox and the CW, including Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, Family Guy, and American Dad).
Compare that with American Idol, the most-watched show on TV and Fox's new crown jewel. Idol started life with a median audience age of 32 that has now climbed to about 42. Adgate adds that even videogames, that bastion of youthful recreation, have had the median age of their users jump from 18 or 19 in 1990 to 33 in 2008. The Simpsons has barely budged.
Apart from finding the fountain of youth, what can Simon Cowell learn from his animated colleagues? Idol, after all, is the most-watched show on TV and Fox's zeitgeistiest phenom, but began to show signs of age in its seventh season with ratings that, though still the envy of the industry, have started to wane.
One idea would be to up the show's testosterone quotient, in an attempt to capture more male viewers. Because in addition to being too old, it seems, Idol's fans are too female.
"The Simpsons is male-driven," says Adgate, appealing to 6- to 11-year-old boys as easily as it does to 18- to 34-year-old men. "A lot of young men, what do they do? Play videogames, go to the movies, go on YouTube, and watch The Simpsons." And because young men watch less TV than their female counterparts, they are among the hardest demographic for advertisers to reach.
For that reason, Adgate estimates, The Simpsons can command an advertising rate that is approximately double that of other Sunday night fodder, like 60 Minutes.
Capitalizing on the success of The Simpsons, Fox has rolled out animated knock-offs such as American Dad, Family Guy, and King of the Hill in recent years.
Of course, there is some common ground between Idol and The Simpsons—if not in their audience makeup, then in the impact they've had on popular culture, says Carrie Drinkwater, senior vice president and director of national broadcast at MPG-North America, a media planning and buying company.
"They're both iconic shows, brands in themselves. It's very hard in this day and age to come up with a TV platform that is a brand itself," she says.
And on at least one count, sheer volume, Idol even comes out well ahead. "If The Simpsons could reach 31 million viewers in a finale, they would be happy," she says, referring to the blockbuster end of Idol season 7, which topped last year’s finale by over 1 million people.
Still, that's no guarantee of anything.
Asked if Idol will still be around in 2021, Scott Grogin, Fox's senior vice president of corporate communications, would said only that "any show that's been on TV for 20 years is a remarkable TV show. The Simpsons, right now, is a singular TV show."
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
