Page 120 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 108
‘The VARA finds itself in a peculiar position. You claim to be the
broadcasting organization of and for the progressive movement, but a part
of that claimed constituency prefers the competition… What amazes us is
that, even though you recognize the situation, you react to it with a kind of
‘reverse market behaviour’. You scold at your competitors and, especially,
at those people who do not show a preference for you, but you don’t seem
to look at home for the cause. If the clients no longer come, you do not
blame your own store, but the clients and the other stores.’
(Quoted in a letter from chairman Albert van den Heuvel to the Kerngroep
TV [Heads of the Television Divisions], 1 October 1982)

What is most significant about this assessment, however, is the language in which it is
put. Terms like ‘market behaviour’ and ‘clients’ imply the acceptance of a marketing
perspective towards the audience which was never part of VARA discourse. The
management, however, took great pains to transform the programme makers’ way of
thinking along these lines, and this meant the introduction of a new perspective on the
institution’s relationship with the audience. This was sometimes done by carefully adding
new words into VARA discourse, as by secretary Herman van Wijk in 1978. ‘If we care
about the social effect of our work, we must take more account of the realities of society’,
he stated, by which he meant that the target audience must first of all be reached. And he
patiently explained:

‘To reach’ means, in this context, to enhance VARA’s appeal, to instil
affection for it. Only when that has been provided for, that is when at least
some uninhibited viewing or listening contact has been made, can we
think about transmitting a ‘message’ and contributing to social
development.
(Van Wijk 1978).

What Van Wijk called for, in fact, was a more consumer-oriented approach, and in this he
set the tone for VARA policy in the years to come, although as late as 1982, chairman
Van den Heuvel still felt the need to explain the importance of ‘getting to know our
“market”’ through research to his programme makers: ‘It concerns the desires and
appreciation of the potential target group, that is, the opinion of those for whom we claim
to work and about whom we regretfully have to observe, that only one third of them is
willing to belong to us’ (Van den Heuvel 1982). In his view, VARA programmes did not
sufficiently take account of the preferences and competences of the audience they were
intended for:

Workers are hardly able to recognize themselves in our programmes. Our
information is too difficult, too inbreeding-like, too jargony, too
presumptuous, too quickly criticizing, and offering too little real insight.
Furthermore, often too elitist in the sense of more interested in the
particular than in the normal, aiming too high, and too trendy.
(ibid.)