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.