Find a Fanatic Audience – Tony Award Ratings

Viewership for the 2012 Tony Awards was at an all-time low – by most accounts only 6 million viewers watched this year’s show on June 10, down from 6.9 million in 2011 and 7 million in 2010. This despite another great hosting job by Neil Patrick Harris, and a show that emphasized popular musical numbers like the opening from “Book of Mormon” and the live performance of numbers from “Hairspray”, live from a cruise ship. The show cut popular features like the tribute to recently deceased theatre artists, and relegated speeches from theatre icons like Bernadette Peters and Manny Azenberg to bumps leading to break. The stories after the Tonys emphasized the audience decline. But another story emerged after all the ratings came in. The Tony Awards finished 16th in the ratings that week, with a very respectable 6.0 rating. Moreover, the demographics of the show are excellent – theatre fans tend to be high income individuals that are hard for advertisers to reach. It’s my feeling that the show would have rated higher had it catered more to the theatre audience, and not tried so many populist tricks. That’s because there’s two ways to get a rating in television – you can have a lot of people watch for a short period of time, or you can have fewer people watch longer. When you have a lot of viewers watching for a long period of time, you generate Super Bowl ratings. Most shows are better off following a strategy that keeps viewers longer, rather than reaching out for new viewers. Therefore, the Tony Awards would probably increase their ratings if they aimed the show squarely at theatre lovers, and produced the show to keep them glued to the set, rather than picking strategies that alienated theatre buffs. The overall audience has also shrunk. Thirty years ago a 6.0 rating would merit an automatic cancellation; these days it gets a show in the top 20 for the week. That’s why I think CBS will continue to air the Tony Awards, and not put it on PBS like they did in past years. For those of us who create content the lesson is clear – Aim at an audience that’s going to be passionate about your work, seek it out no matter where it is, and will recommend it to their friends. We’ll talk in future posts about how to build that audience.

Why There are so many talent competition shows

The answer to this question is obvious at first -- talent competition shows dominate the ratings. Dancing With the Stars, American Idol, the Voice, and America's Got Talent are among the top rated shows every week. More competition ideas keep being announced -- Duets is on the air, The Glee Project has returned, and more are in development at every network. Cost is also a factor. Even with the outrageous salaries paid the top judges, reality competition shows cost less per episode than scripted dramas. The major broadcast networks are no longer very profitable -- some regularly lose money. They are no longer the flagship businesses but instead part of a portfolio of channels owned by major media companies -- Comcast (NBC), Disney (ABC), CBS/Viacom (CBS) and Fox (Fox). Broadcast networks provide a valuable platform for these networks' sports and news properties. They have value for these media companies even if they lose money. Understandably, the corporations want them to lose as little as possible. Hence, the move to reality competition shows. I've predicted this move in this blog. Variety shows used to be a staple of network broadcast schedules in the 60s and 70s. The Ed Sullivan Show is the most iconic, but other popular variety show hosts included the Smothers Brothers, Flip Wilson, Sonny and Cher, and Dean Martin. Howard Cosell even hosted a variety show on Saturday nights for one season, the show that introduced the Bay City Rollers to America. In television, everything old becomes new again. It's the time for variety shows, updated to include modern competition and new judges. When you're looking for content ideas, try giving an old idea a new twist. After all, how many variations of Romeo and Juliet have we seen since Shakespeare first penned the play the in 1500s?

Get in the Game!

A friend of mine who is between jobs visited me and said, "You should make a reality show about job searching." There are a lot of us out there with interesting stories." It's a shame that my friend, along with many other Americans, is still looking for work. He means well, but his suggestion shows that he hasn't really examined his idea in depth. He assumes, that if he doesn't see his idea on television, it's because no one's ever had the idea before. In fact, there's no shortage of ideas to create great content. What's lacking are creators with the skill to make their story compelling, whether they're writing a novel, making a movie, shooting a TV show, or creating a video game. That's why you can't copyright an idea -- you can only copyright an expression of an idea. Creating a believeable world with characters so striking the viewers are compelled to watch takes time and effort. Your idea is just the start. You must sit down and flesh out your characters and setting in detail. You have to be willing to spend months writing your novel, pitching your story, polishing your screenplay, detailing your character bibles. It's a cliche because it's true: You may have to work for years to become an overnight sensation. You can't create anything unless you get in the game. Carve out time in your day to create. Make progress every day. Don't suggest an idea for someone else to create; go make it yourself.