Page 39 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 2

Audience considerations have an impact on the content of genric
programming. For instance, until 2005 LucasArts and Sony’s online
game Star Wars Galaxies had appealed to an older audience, based on a
sophisticated strategy. However, in 2005 LucasArts abruptly announced
that it was completely changing the science fiction video game to ap-
peal to its target market of 14-to-26-year-old males. According to Nancy
MacIntyre, the game’s senior director, the game was reconfigured to give
the younger players “instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat.” 33
The media industry uses genres to deliver the desired audience to its
advertisers. The most sought-after audience consists of people between
the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. Alan Wurtzel, president of research
and media development for NBC, explains that the goal is to train this
group for future consumer behaviors:

None of the networks can afford to ignore this generation anymore. In
10 years, Generation Y will take their behaviors and look at the world
and media in a different way than we do. Generation Y never knew a
time when there wasn’t the Internet, or 75 to 100 channels, and music
was purchased instead of downloaded. They will take that behavior with
them as they get older. If we don’t figure out how to appeal to them, we
will all be in trouble. 34

As a result, it is not merely the size of the audience, but the profit-
ability of that audience that determines whether a genre appears in the
media. For instance, by 1998 (before the emergence of Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire), the once popular quiz show genre had largely disap-
peared from the American television landscape. Only three quiz shows
appeared on network television: Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! and The
Price Is Right. One reason for this decline was that these quiz shows
were unable to attract a young audience. Sixty percent of the audience
was over the age of fifty-five. Lucy Johnson, senior vice president for
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daytime and children’s programming at CBS, observed, “For a 25-year-
old, it may be the pacing that’s old-fashioned. We’ve created a nation of
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viewers who demand instant gratification and payoffs every 30 seconds.”
Consequently, advertisers, who are fixated on a young target market, had
little interest in game shows. Roy Currlin, an executive at the advertising
agency Ammirati Puris Lintas, declared, “The audience is just so old that
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we tend to avoid them.” However, in 1999, when Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire suddenly attracted a young audience, an influx of new game
shows on the air soon followed.

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