Hasta La Creative!

By G.B. Meyer

As the death knell sounds for the evening news, there may be a few culprits that have gone unmentioned. One of them is advertising.

Not in the way that ad rates have dropped for evening news shows, or viewers have skewed to older demographics, but simply, the ads that run during the evening news are unwatchable.

No less than 90% of the commercials that run during the three network broadcasts are for prescription drugs, with the vast majority targeting the 50+ audience. Since no one enjoys watching these commercials, nor hearing them, you have to change the channel to escape until the news comes back on. So inevitably you switch the channel to another network’s news and there’s a prescription drug ad. So you click away from that, a few channels farther, and end up clicking back three or four times just to get back to the news while trying to avoid the still-playing ad for once-a-day Spiriva.

It becomes tedious.

Beyond the notion of why prescription drugs ads were ever allowed on T.V., to have these dominate the nightly news broadcasts comes off as giving up on ever reaching younger audiences again. So the evening news is actually pushing younger people away, not to mention older ones as well, who’d rather not watch these commercials either.

This is just one element that’s gone unmentioned. Another factor may be that
network news has tried to chase the casual, John Stewart-influenced world of broadcasting. When the fact is, whether you’re 16 or 55, you prefer your anchormen/women on national news broadcasts to be serious. But now, the anchors try to be our cool friends, with Brian Williams going on Saturday Night Live, Katie Couric taking an online poll to come up with a witty signoff, and Charles Gibson telling us at the end of each broadcast that he hopes we had a good day. Can you picture Peter Jennings doing that?

This is the kind of pandering that drives viewers away.

On the same front, NBC thought that their original lead-in voice, which announced Tom Brokaw for a couple decades, was too serious. So they toned it down by bringing in Michael Douglas.

In an era of heavy accusations of liberal bias in the news, NBC hired an actor from Hollywood, California to be their new lead-in voice.

These are the kind of ancillary decisions that just may be killing off the evening news. Competition from cable, the Internet, etc. are part of the story but they may be just that – part of it.

G.B. Meyer is a citizen, a copywriter and a consumer.
www.gmeyer-ads.com