The Mindset the Networks Must Enter to Survive

This is a short posting because what it will take to save the television networks is not complicated. All it takes is shifting into a mindset that leads to the solutions they need.

Recall the often cited Einsteinian wisdom that a problem can not be solved in the same consciousness in which it arose. Network leadership needs to abandon its traditional consciousness which is dominated by a narrow "numbers-based” picture of viewers derived from Nielsen ratings.

The networks are quite in line with their recent criticisms of the inadequacies of Nielsen, but err in failing to take responsibility for their own contribution to the Nielsen view of life in television audiences.

The erosion of network audiences is an outcome of behavior, not of data sets. So the networks need to study viewer behavior more than they study the representations of 0’s and 1’s in processed data. Television viewers are not eyeballs to be counted, but flesh and blood organisms with beating hearts to be connected with.

They need to stop looking externally and blaming good weather, computer games, errors in viewer ratings systems, etc for disappointing audience counts and start looking internally to what they've done to lose relevance to viewers thereby driving them into cable television.

In other words, they need to enter an introspective mindset that acknowledges both their own humanness and that of viewers to have any hope of plotting a plan to be around as the next decade begins.

Comments

[Vick Thomas]

I read with interest your writing about the need for a new measurement system for networks which you state is an out come of behavior. I agree with the outcome of behavior but it is much bigger than beating hearts and emotions of the viewers. It has to do with erosion as a result of viewing options.

As viewing options expand (choice of networks, cable and internet time) the available TV (universe) audience size gets smaller. As a result of the audience erosion due to choice the quantative differences is not stastically significant and therefore less reliable.

If an advertiser is placing an ad in "Survivor" Nielsen measures how many eyeballs are watching "Survivor" and not rating the commercial message, which TiVo and the remote generally zaps or is not being eyeballed by the viewer at all.

I have always wondered how an advertiser constantly places TV ads in shows that are measured and really don't have a solid handle on the recall that the viewer actually payed close attention to the message thar aired. Selling and buying advertising time in 'highly rated' programs is a commodity business and quantitatively based television evaluation methodologies has created the misallocatoin of advertising dollars. You are right -- a better measurement system needs to be put in place that more accurately reflects the greater Customer Majorities reaction to mindless programming dramatically impacting the Cost Per Thousand spent with equally mindless advertising.

[David Wolfe]

Vicki, you speak such thruth when you say, "Selling and buying advertising time in 'highly rated' programs is a commodity business and quantitatively based television evaluation methodologies has created the misallocatoin of advertising dollars." Maybe some day down the road, someone in some network will get it.

[John Smith]

Is anybody listening?