Do You Know Me?

Today's 'hit' tv shows don't reach 1% of Americans - but still cost a lot

What do Blue Man Group and Shen Yun have in common? Both have high unaided recall awareness among TV viewers who see their ads during the course of a year. But what percent of each demographic target that they aim for did they reach, and how many times did they reach them?

I ask because only their most perspicacious followers know each troupe’s performers by name. Unlike in sports, these performers don’t wear their names on the back of their uniforms. The programs might not even help you pick them out of a lineup. As opposed to playing for teams that have local TV contracts, the stars in the casts of Jersey Boys, Ice Capades, Cirque du Soleil or the others score high recognition quotients as artists performing collectively.

Naturally, it got around that one colleague at BBDO’s mother had been a Rockette. It may be that, indeed over time, someone has asked our teammate, “Are you the Drumm from the Rockettes?” But only she would know that.

One writer told me years ago that her show, Blue Bloods, was one of primetime’s top-rated hits. Yet the difference in its Nielsen’s ratings over that time show a sharp decline.

Network primetime has hit headwinds: total viewers in Blue Bloods since its first season in 2011 through 2022, the most recent season that it posts, reflect a decline of 25%. Still, it remains desirable to advertisers despite it being lower in its swansong year. The majority of primetime programming doesn’t “move the meter” anymore.

Some Americans have as many as 20,000 channel choices, including streaming. With the total TV-viewing universe populations growing every year, it’s harder to earn a higher percentage of the audience. A show’s rating, its batting average, not its millions or hundreds of thousands of viewers, or hits, is the only accurate platform to gauge both brand awareness and disparity of celebrity. The bigger the entire audience, the more targeted viewers are in the audience.

These seeds were planted in me at Ogilvy and Mather. On one occasion the American Express team was called in to screen different “Do You Know Me?” credit card ads. I thought William Miller, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 running mate, epitomized a guy who was in the national spotlight for a while, but vanished soon after. My colleagues preferred the campaigns featuring people who TV audience knew well.

Mass communication is determined by media buyers in large part. And they follow the path of least resistance to the largest commissions. This is despite new–and diverse–ways to use TV sold by tried-and-true media goliaths. TV’s advertiser-supported viewership has shifted from broadcast-only to cable and satellite through today’s Roku and other ad-supported streaming. As a result, relatively few shows today reach even 1 percent, or 1,125,000 U.S. TV Households, on average.

Hence, 1.0 rated “hits” miss 99% of each commercial’s target audience. Demand for NFL’s regularly high ratings is so fevered that on the last NFL weekend of the presidential campaign season, I looked for, but did not see, any of New York’s 12 regional Congressional candidates’ local spots during the Giants vs the Commanders on FOX because the breaks were scooped up by cars and trucks. Absent NFL and NCAA football, TV as a medium no longer offers its advertisers a captive audience.

Studios, in that same way, bid up prices for specific programs for their weekend releases.

Disney, Paramount and Peacock own broadcast network affiliate and digital stations.

All have multi-tier cable, satellite and streaming platforms in multiple languages, and boast to advertisers that, individually, they have the tools to reach all of us collectively an overwhelming number of times. Why, then, do they bid up their competition’s time to release their own movies?

I could have made a movie while sitting in an examining room, for 45 minutes waiting for a doctor who’d be right in. He walked in unapologetically while I was lacing my shoes, readying to leave. After a search, I saw he’d been a lead Riverdance performer. While rolling my eyes, I flashed to a screening I was called into 40 years ago while at American Home Products.

NBC was steeped in last place behind ABC and CBS. But American Home (Advil, Robitussin, Chapstick, etc.) was the third largest TV spender in the country. It had just famously committed two-thirds of its funds to NBC in a record two-year deal. This was because, at that time, even the last place network reached everyone every month. I saw Primetime pre-emptions every day but Daytime was steady until they chucked three game shows and gave David Letterman that time.

On the show I was called down to screen, he compared and contrasted AHP’s Anacin’s ingredients with its competitors. If only I could remember the set-up line, but Dave’s come-back, “When my doctor plays Vegas, I’ll take his word for it,” hit spot on: my doctor played Vegas!

And Riverdance is more widely recognized than the hospital. Hmm. Shouldn’t the hospital add a commercial linking them with Riverdance to its arsenal of ads?