I know, you might be thinking, “What does kids liking movies more then food have to do with media?” Well, if you’re the largest children network nickelodeon, it has a lot to do with media. Recently, I came across an article on www.adage.com that said that in 2009, food was replaced by movies as the second largest marketing category . (No surprise that toys were number one) The article said that the success that Hollywood had last year had a direct impact on advertisers. Nickelodeon is expecting the same results for 2010, especially with the release of a new Happy Potter movie and a movie based on nickelodeon’s own TV show, “Avatar the Last Airbender.” Though food moved down to the third highest marketing category, nickelodeon says that; with brands such as Kellogg and General Mills making new, healthier foods, advertisers should have fun with these new products, which they are hoping will lead to better numbers than those of 2009.
Ok, so for people who don’t know by now, television is basically run by advertisement. If it weren’t for advertisement, there would be no TV. David Crouteau and William Hoynes spend a lot of time in their book, “Media Society” explaining just how important advertisement is to TV. They explain how the main reason for TV is for companies to make money. This is why commercials are so important and the reason why you will NEVER have 100% commercial or advertisement free TV. We have TV shows so that during the commercial break, many companies can advertise their product so that the audience will eventually buy their product. This why so many shows end up getting canceled. If no one watches them, that means that no one is watching the commercials, and companies loose money. TV producers use what Croteau and Hoynes call Logic of Safety. This is basically saying that Companies try to minimize the risks of loosing money on programs. Companies realize that a show very rarely is going to start out with very high ratings, so they try to avoid sows that are going to be definite failures. This included shows that may cause controversy. Croteau and Hoynes also talk about narrowcasting, which is when an business puts there commercial during TV shows that target a selected audience.
An example of this is how nearly all of the commercials shown on nickelodeon are targeted toward kids. Movies may be the second largest marketing category, but each movie will not have a rating over PG-13. This is due to narrowcasting.
I remember being a little kid and watching commercials on nickelodeon and after the commercial would go off, I would always want my parents to go out and buy what I just saw. The items on my Christmas list were all things I had seen during a commercial. This is TV working at its best. They had interesting shows that I enjoyed watching, and commercials that had products that me, as a young child, would want. Nickelodeon is the #1 children network, and the commercials shown during their TV shows will be seem by millions of kids everyday. Toy companies, movies, and food companies are bound to make a lot of money if they advertise to kids on Nickelodeon, and that’s pretty much why TV exists in the first place; so that companies can make a lot of money!
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David S.
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