Who Is This For?

There's a show on ITV2 called "Wags' Boutique". (I don't know if I've got the apostrophe right, or even if they bother with one at all, and frankly, Lynn Truss has put me off caring about it any more).
Anyway, it's very loud and brash and of the moment, or if you work in TV "noisy, impactful and zeitgeisty". It's about some footballers wives and girlfriends who are forced to work in a clothes shop, presumably to give them a glimpse of what the world would be like for them without football. Like all reality shows it's totally unreal and heavily produced, with some very unappealing people being allowed to display their ignorance in public. But you have to admire the way it's been tailor-made for a specific audience - heat reading young women, obsessed with minor celebrity and clothes; high-spending, fashion-conscious, aspirational young women. Exactly the kind of people ITV2 would like as a key part of their audience.
Broadcasters and programme makers are constantly being told by their marketing people to rethink the way they create and schedule programming - the audience is changing, how and when and what they are watching is changing and what constitutes a successful programme, certainly in commercial terms, is changing. Beware, or be aware of the Long Tail. Create stuff for smaller, more specifically-targeted audiences.

Ok, I buy the theory, and top marks to ITV2 for putting it into practice. But watching WAGs Boutique (maybe that's how they do it without an apostrophe?) on a conventional television in real time with ad breaks, I became confused.
The first three ads in the break were cures for Diarrhoea, Thrush and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Now either there's something I've got wrong about heat readers, or I've underestimated the strike rate for these medical conditions, or the airtime salesmen of ITV2 have been knocking on the wrong doors, or the manufacturers of Cool Stuff For Twenty Five Year Old Women don't think it's worth spending money on niche programming on a digital channel OR the only people watching ITV2 on a Wednesday night are , in fact, semi-pensioners like me, and the advertisers know it.

I may have failed to understand anything about tv or advertising; as I say, much of the business is very boring, but I do wonder how much of this youth-skewed content is totally wasted and inappropriate. The editorial boffins at ITV2 must surely be appalled at the idea that the audience for one of their most heavily-promoted shows ever is pre-occupied with "trouble downstairs".

This isn't just confined to tv. Look at the Telegraph magazine on a Saturday. It's full of cutting-edge articles about Hollywood's hottest new starlet, cool Interior features on the new vogue for Onyx kitchens and interviews with Banksy. But look in the back pages, where most of the ads are and you'll find stretch trousers, shoe-lifts, compost bins and comfy slippers.

So who is reading all that sub-ID stuff? I don't think the Telegraph magazine editor would like the idea of my mum representing a significant part of his readership.

I suppose what I'm driving at is that creating content which targets a discrete audience in a bold original way shouldn't be an activity which excludes the 'mature' consumer. Old people will be watching television and reading magazines for a long time yet and I personally am longing for the first really cool campaign for Grecian 2000.

Comments

[Phil]

The advertising on WAG's Boutique (or whatever) isn't in the breaks. In programming like this the breaks are sort of junk DNA; it's a rhythm that people just expect.