Television & Toothpaste

Friends keep sending me this Los Angeles Times article to blog:

Television is starting to look beyond the 18- to 49-year-old demographic Marketers targeted the group hoping to build brand loyalty in young people. Some in the TV industry now view that as short-sighted …

It’s a good piece with good quotes, but I kept putting it off because this blog has blogged the subject to death.  For years. A post from 2005:

Where's the TV for us?
Network television not only is under siege from other media - but compounds the problem by ignoring Baby Boomers … Brad Adgate of Horizon Media and Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC Universal, do a good job exposing the silliness of television advertisers (and advertising agencies) targeting only the 19-49 demographic …

A bunch of other posts.

Last year Les Moonves and yours truly were quoted in an article by Jennifer Mann of The Kansas City Star:

Baby boomers become the forgotten consumer

Back to the LA Times piece:

… Some network executives and media buyers think the notion that young people's brand loyalty must be won early is, in Moonves' words, "an old wives' tale." The idea was that "if you bought Crest toothpaste when you were 18 years old, when you turned 50 you would still use Crest toothpaste," Moonves said.

Indeed, Sternberg and others said they knew of no reliable studies backing that theory.

Believe it or not … I’ve even talked about toothpaste.