Authors: Patricia Cohen
It was from this perch that he published a jargon-studded article
titled “Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation and Marketing as Alternative Marketing Strategies” in the 1956
Journal of Marketing
. Businesses and consultants had practiced segmentation before. In the twenties, the marketing consultant and
Ladies' Home Journal
writer Christine Frederick had advised her clients to tailor appeals to different age groups.
In the thirties, department stores
and clothing manufacturers created the toddler stage by segregating children's clothing in separate sections, and in the forties the word “teenager” was popularized by marketers who recognized the buying power of these nascent consumers. But Smith put this tactic into a larger conceptual framework.
He argued that the strategy of selling the same item
to as many people as possible had reached its limit. Consumers had different needs and desires, which businesses had ignored. A better approach was to break down the single mass of consumers into assorted segments and then adapt merchandise accordingly. For the first time, industrial processes had the efficiency and technical ability to diversify a company's products, which made segmentation profitable in a way that it previously was not.
In Smith's view, “The emergence of market segmentation as a strategy once again provides evidence of the consumer's preeminence in the contemporary American economy and the richness of the rewards that can result from the application of science to marketing problems.” Advertisers had adopted a scientific approach when they employed strategic polling.
As early as 1940
, Elmo Roper modified his job description from “Poll-Taker” to “Marketing Consultant,” telling businesses that survey data could open up the “mass mind” to them. Like the PR mandarin Edward Bernays, who wanted to apply scientific management to marketing, Smith wanted to marry advertising and science. Taylorites would have been proud.
Smith's ideas rippled through the industry. The Alpha Psi Kappa Foundation, a nonprofit group devoted to educating business leaders, named his piece the most important marketing article of the year. Companies immediately took notice and earnestly began to cut up the mass of consumers based on income, gender, geography, ethnicity, and age to more precisely target their message to potential buyers. Instead of putting resources into publicizing the benefits of a product, Smith argued
that advertisers should create a community of like-minded consumers, and then heavily advertise to that group.
As the business historian
Richard Tedlow explained: “Segmentation based not on logistics or on some genuine product characteristics, but on demographic and psychographic groupings carved out of the general population is an invention of late 20th century American marketing.”
When ABC decided to pursue a younger market, it had demographics on its side. By 1966, nearly half of the American population was under age 25 and their influence surged through the culture. Soon it became clear that some viewers were more equal than others. Advertisers drilled deeper into the youth market, further elevating viewers in the 18-to-34 bracket.
The spirit of youthful nonconformity
and rebellion that the Beats embodied was already infusing advertisements by the late 1950s and early 1960s. There was a qualitative shift in the mid-sixties, however. Rather than target an isolated age group, advertisements proffered a characteristic sought by everyoneâyouthfulness. Or perhaps it would be better to call it “youthiness,” a cousin of the word “truthiness” coined by the television-show host Stephen Colbert to satirize the political discourse on the Iraq war. Colbert was referring to rhetorical devices that were used to appeal to people's emotions rather than intellectâ“something that seems like truth, the truth we want to exist.” Marketers were not going after an existing youth demographic but manufacturing a segment of consumers who wanted to feel youthful. Pepsi's slogan was not “the drink for those who are young” but the “drink for those who think young.”
“
The old fragmentation was based
on realities, but this new segmentation springs wholly from the imagination of the marketer,” Tedlow argues. “There was no such thing as the Pepsi Generation until Pepsi created it.” Manufacturers and advertisers were attempting to “create group identities where before there had been nothing more than elementary feelings and survey answers.”
Since the sixties, corporations and political parties have increasingly used survey techniques to break the public into finely graded segments and cluster them in novel formulations. But while some of these
consumer-oriented surveyors revealed affinities that people were unaware of, many others created group identities where none previously existed. In recent years, marketers and consultants have created categories like early adapters, techies, metrosexuals, soccer moms, cougars, angry white men, and Sam's Club votersâsome of them based on perceived similarities that seem critically important one moment and dissipate the next.
Throughout the late sixties and seventies, the cult of youth dominated the country and the airwaves, nudged along by Nielsen's attention to a younger demographic. The feminist movement inspired a couple of popular exceptions, like the TV character Maude, an outspoken, Mack truck of a middle-aged protagonist. But advertisers continued to dismiss viewers in their middle years. “
I went to Hollywood
in 1979 and asked television executives if they were bringing out anything for older audiences,” Landon Y. Jones, the author of the 1980 book
Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation,
recalled. “They looked at me like I was from Mars.”
In the mid-1980s, baby boomers moved into middle age and positions of power in broadcasting just as cable was restructuring broadcast television. By 1990, viewers were abandoning the networks in droves.
The prime-time cable audience
had increased thirty-five percent, while the networks' had shrunk by twenty-five percent. The trend continued through the end of the century.
The obsession with age had created a double bind. “
The worse TV nets perform
at getting large audiences, the more they emphasize segments, and the more they emphasize audience segments, the more they lose audience,” John Polich, a professor of communications at Fordham University, observed. In surveys, the vast majority of respondents over 40 complained that they had a hard time finding television shows that reflected their lives.
As cable stations proliferated, many sought to target a niche of viewers. This both fragmented the culture and reinforced the notion that each age group has its own distinct interests, stories, and styles. MTV and Nickelodeon sought to siphon off younger audiences and children; ESPN went after sports fans. The WB network, launched in 1995, was created
in response to ad buyers' continuing hunger for youthful programming (it was later swept up by the newly constituted CW network). The Super Bowl may be the only regularly scheduled program left that can count on drawing in large numbers from every generation.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s
, advertisers and ad buyers continued to crown the younger consumer as king. “If you were 50, you were dead,” said Matt Thornhill, the founder of the marketing firm the Boomer Project. “You just didn't exist. We could care less about you. If we cared about you at all, you were part of this group called seniors, and we wanted to sell you Geritol and Depends.”
The preference showed up in ad prices
. In 1997, thirty seconds of ad time on Fox's
The Simpsons
(thirty-second in the ratings) commanded $168,100, while
Walker, Texas Ranger
(in thirty-fourth place but with an older audience) cost $85,400. For
Melrose Place,
a show popular with teenagers, Fox got $17.28 for every thousand viewers who watched compared with $5.10 that CBS received for the same number of middle-agers who tuned in to
Touched by an Angel.
The head of sales for Fox at the time
described older viewers as “common currency, copper as opposed to gold,” adding, “Who do you think are the early adapters? They set the style and determined what was trendy.”
The predilection for youth has persisted despite demographic shifts that bulked up the middle-aged public.
In 1993â94 the median age of prime-time
viewers topped 40; in 1997, it inched past 42; in 2010, it passed 51. During the past two decades the television audience has aged twice as fast as the general population. Television is the favored medium of middle age, but it has been a case of unrequited love.
A&E's Raven thinks the 20-somethings
who buy ad space further denigrate the value of middle-aged viewers. “When you go to an ad agency, the people who are making the decisions are my son's age,” said Raven. “It's hard to make the case to advertisers that baby boomers are an important demographic.”
No one knows that better than
David Poltrack, who came to CBS more than four decades ago, and since 1994 has been vice president of research and planning. CBS's audience is typically a few years older than its competitors, and for more than twenty-five years,
Poltrack has consistently argued that the 18-to-49-year-old slice of the audience is not the nirvana that most advertisers and television executives assume. He says that all the truisms about middle-aged viewersâthat they spend less, avoid switching brands, and formed their lifelong habits at the dawn of timeâare exaggerated, if not altogether wrong. He maintains it is a mistake to neglect the vast swath of 50-plus Americans who are television's most loyal viewers. “We should really be paying attention to the baby boomer market,” Poltrack explained from his no-nonsense office on the twenty-fourth floor of Black Rock, CBS's granite headquarters in Manhattan. “We're leaving this age group at a point when wealth is great, consumption is greater, and their consumer power is greatest.” He has made that argument hundreds if not thousands of times. As is explained in the next chapter, only recently have advertisers and buyers begun to heed his message.
The neglect of middle age in the movies
is due to a different constellation of economic interests than that of television and magazines. The industry caters to youthful audiences not because advertisers demand it but because filmmakers and studios believe that young audiences will buy more tickets. In the late fifties and sixties, that assumption was true. Middle-aged parents spent their movie and popcorn money on shoes and accordion lessons for the first baby boomers. In 1957, three-quarters of theater audiences were under 30; half were under 20. A decade later, the same kids who had kept their parents home on Saturday nights were filling seats themselves. Half of the film audience was between 16 and 24. “To catch the greatest audience you had to zero in on the 19-year-old male,” American International Pictures concluded in a 1968 report, arguing that female and younger viewers deferred to the male teen's movie selection. AIP was an independent company specializing in exploitation films, but its analysis was extraordinarily influential.
Today, movie audiences look very different.
Forty percent of frequent
moviegoers are over 40; twenty-one percent are between 18 and 24. But movies are still geared toward 19-year-old males. Teenagers are more likely to rush to theaters on that crucial opening box-office weekend that primes
foreign sales of distribution rights. Animated and action features not only draw in young repeat customers, but they offer more opportunities for lucrative merchandise tie-ins and a longer afterlife on DVD and around the world. (There is not a very promising market for Middle Age Man action figures.)
The film industry's attitude toward middle age is captured by a printed notice that occasionally appears on tickets for pre-release film screenings that the invitation does not extend to anyone over 50.
The privileged status of youth on television and in movies has strongly influenced our conception of middle age. Characters on-screen exert a magnetic force on viewers, simultaneously reflecting and guiding tastes, values, attitudes, and affections. A character can create a fashion trend (Diane Keaton's tie and hat in
Annie Hall
), turn into a cultural touchstone (Snooki in
Jersey Shore
), ignite a generational stance (
Easy Rider
), or coin a catchphrase (“Make my day”). The extraordinary promotional power of being on-screen is what initially turned nameless actors into celebrities and product spokesmen, and is what currently makes movies and TV shows such a valuable adjutant of the Midlife Industrial Complex. Film and television manufacture myths, prototypes, and desires, as well as the gestures, language, and styles to communicate them. They influence both men and women's notions of what sexiness, beauty, patriotism, sincerity, and snobbery look and sound like.
For decades Hollywood has instructed men on how to look cool, how to romance a girl, and how to have a midlife crisis. The hardy trope of leaving your wife, buying a sports car, and running off with a cheerleader at age 40 plotted out in countless films, television episodes, and cartoons has persisted through the years, even making an appearance recently in the Grand Theft Auto video game. (When the aging crime boss buys a sports car, his wife says she can “smell” his midlife crisis.)
In the 1960s and 1970s, films featured middle-aged sellouts exiting the rat race or suffering from existential angst. In
The Arrangement,
Eddie
Anderson (Kirk Douglas) composes ad campaigns for a “clean cigarette” before trying to swerve his Triumph into a tractor trailer, and in
Save the Tiger,
Harry Stoner (Jack Lemmon) careers toward a midlife breakdown as he engages in smarmy attempts to stave off bankruptcy.
In
The Swimmer,
based on John Cheever's short story, Neddy Merrill (Burt Lancaster) realizes one midsummer Sunday while drinking gin at a friend's that a watery route home lies through the backyard pools of his affluent Westchester neighbors. As he progresses on his journey, his whimsical venture turns into a pilgrim's progress in reverse. Films habitually used the successful suburban middle-aged man as a metaphor for social anomie and moral bankruptcy. In 1968, Merrill seemed like a symbol of America in that annus horribilis, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, riots reverberated through college campuses, and the country seemed to have lost its way in an unpopular war.