With sincere apologies to Jack Wakshlag, television viewing is up, according to a report from Nielsen. An average household now watches eight hours and 11 minutes a day.

But the issue that matters isn’t how much we’re watching but what we’re watching. Exploding options have so fragmented the audience, that the mass market that TV used to deliver is disintegrating. These same households now average over 100 channels of programming, according to the report.

Nielsen said the average individual watched four hours and 32 minutes of TV last season, the highest level in 15 years.

The question, however, is so what? Why does that really matter? It doesn’t, because the industry isn’t sold based on overall viewing anyway. It used to be that a salesperson could walk into a retailer’s shop and say, “Look here: everybody’s watching more TV,” and it would mean something, because the salesperson’s station represented a sizeable slice of the overall pie. It doesn’t anymore, and more and more advertisers are waking up to this reality.

TV is still the best advertising bang for the buck, imo, and it will probably be the one form of mass media that actually survives long term. It will be a shadow of its former self, however, and those who prosper will do so in a multimedia environment.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 30th, 2005 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.