BBC fails to understand that age and multi-channel TV don’t mix

In February 2003 BBC launch a new TV channel (BBC Three) and to date has spent a tad short of £100 Million on the venture. Why is this of any interest? Well the channel was aimed at the beloved age group the 25-34 year olds.

A week or so back a Professor Barwise (London Business School) presented the report, commissioned by Government, to review how things had worked out for this and the BBC’s other digital channels.

Well things have not gone too well, to put it mildly. Professor Barwise described the BBC’s “obsession” with 25 to 34-year-olds as “a creative straightjacket”.

In today’s issue of Marketing there is a hard hitting article about this issue:
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Much of the problem stems from the obsession in the BBC that every channel in the digital age should have a clearly defined target audience. This has now been revealed as over-intellectualised, wasteful nonsense. Barwise concludes that the adult TV audience is only weakly segmented, whether by programme genre preference, channel preference or demographics. 'Television,' he argues, 'is a mass medium, not a niche medium.”

This essential truth should be tattooed onto the foreheads of all those seeking to launch digital channels and waste millions of pounds. It can even be turned into a rough and ready formula: aim for a niche show on a niche channel and you are almost guaranteed a zero audience - something the BBC has had little difficulty achieving. It beggars belief that anyone could have thought it sensible to target a £99m channel at so narrow a demographic as 25- to 34-year-olds.”

So there you have it. If they ever had considered the prospect of a 50+ channel (which is most unlikely) I suspect it has been abandoned Dick Stroud www.20plus30.com