I found myself amused–sort of–by this news article on how TV doesn’t seem to be reaching the Boomers, i.e., my generation (Study: TV’s Youth Obsession Backfiring). Here are some excerpts:
A significant number of baby boomers – 37 percent – say they aren’t happy with what’s on television, according to the study.
…“The amount of people dissatisfied with television overall was a pretty big eye-opening thing for us,” said Larry Jones, president of the TV Land cable network, which commissioned the study.
To a certain extent, the generation that decades ago warned against trusting people over 30 can blame itself for the predicament. The TV industry’s slavish devotion to ratings within the 18-to-49-year-old demographic started when most baby boomers fit into that group.
…The peak year for births within the baby boom, Jones noted, was 1957 – meaning all those people are turning 49 this year.
Much of the television industry isn’t aging with them.
“They’ve just never changed or haven’t realized that the population has moved on,” said Randy Berkowitz, vice president of research for Combe Inc., which makes health products and beauty aids.
Berkowitz believes that “people are just not in tune with TV because they can’t relate to it anymore.”
…To a surprising extent, advertising is also alienating. The Harris Interactive study found that half of baby boomers say they tune out commercials that are clearly aimed at young people. An additional one-third said they’d go out of their way NOT to buy such a product.
I really had to laugh at this. Very little consideration is given to what we aging Boomers might actually think. They assume that television and especially advertising isn’t reaching us because Madison Avenue isn’t trying hard enough.
Some years ago I was listening to a tribute to novelist Wallace Stegner who had died recently. One of those speaking, I forget who, started his talk by observing that one of the gifts of middle age is the realization that most of what you do for a living consists of or is based on bullshit. That thought struck me as true, and went straight home to the bottom of my gut and stayed there as I slouched towards middle age myself.
Has it ever ocurred to these Madison Avenue types that maybe, just maybe, people our age, with our life experience, are more likely to know when we are being fed bullshit? Could it possibly be that the generation who returned the distrust of big corporations to our national discourse might resent Madison Avenue as manufacturers of industrial quantities of discontent?
Now bear in mind I don’t have a problem with advertising per se. I do have a serious problem with “creating a need” that wasn’t there before, or setting up the pitch in such a way that insinuates that your life is a pile of crap and that they only way out is to buy something, even if it’s something you don’t need or even want.
With age comes perspective. One becomes thoughtful, wiser. I have found that when I’m mentally “in the zone” TV is less appealing not because they are speaking to a younger crowd, but because they are going after people who are easier to bamboozle into thinking that this or that bauble or toy will rescue them from loserdom. I am told that advertising is harder today than it used to be because audiences and consumers are gradually developing resistence to all the time-tested techniques. I hope that’s true. But would such a requisite degree of cynicism also make people impervious to ideas that are actually good?
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The real question, though, is whether our or any generation is really as independent minded as we hope, or are we just getting stubborn? I like to think that the ability to resist or tune out commercials and advertising is a sign of intelligence. Something every guerrilla scholar needs to keep in mind is this: there is a war out there for your mind. Most people have lost that war in that don’t have their own opinions; they have someone else’s and probably don’t even know how it got there.
“That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time.”
— John Stuart Mill