It’s Official: TV is Too Old for Itself

In what might be my favorite irony of 2008 thus far, Variety points out that “if [TV Networks] were a person, they wouldn’t even be a part of TV’s target demo anymore.”  A recent survey by Magna Global pegged the broadcast networks’ median age for live viewership at 50, a year past TV’s traditional 18-49 demographic.  Don’t blame the baby boomers for getting old, though — it’s younger audiences that are not picking up the slack.

CSM’s Horizons Blog attributes the demographic shift primarily to the myriad of interactive alternatives which are making the web the “first screen” of a new generation:

This is one of the clearest signs that the Internet is a competitor to television. While cable TV is certainly another major player, idle surfing, social networking, YouTube viewing, news reading, MP3 downloading, and email drafting has pulled Americans away from the small screen and toward a smaller one.

As audiences continue to fragment across MANY “smaller screens”, media spending has been slow to follow consumer behavior.  In fact, event programming continues to increase its premium, despite delivering less for advertisers.  In many cases, it would seem that many marketers are holding out hope for the emergence of the next :30-spot.

Don’t hold your breath.  Audiences are not simply shifting from one mass medium to another — and even where such mass can be rediscovered, the dynamics, economics and strategies learned from decades of mass marketing no longer apply.

Orange Balloons Race Across the Web

Following in the footsteps of PMOG, Modernista and the upcoming RocketOn, the latest experiment in experiences which span the canvas of the web comes in the form of balloon animals.  A campaign for Orange (the telcom, not the color — though that’s prominently featured as well) took to the virtual skies earlier this week in what is being touted as the “World’s First Internet Balloon Race.”

Fortunately, creator Poke London was able to inflate the racers without the aid of clowns… and you can view my record-breaking hopeful below, which has traveled a respectable “829 Internet Miles” (whatever that means) since Tuesday.

It’s a fun effort to keep people engaged, and enabling sites to garner traffic (and willfully promote the brand in the process) by becoming a stop along the virtual race track is a great structure to assure quick distribution and buzz; but what I find particularly interesting here is the ongoing evolution of a trend toward more distributed experiences which leave the comfort of their cozy microsites to explore and connect with the broader web.

It’s not too late to join the race, but good luck catching this inflatable porpoise.