Bill will tell you that between the two of us, I'm much more prone to wanting to give Dawn and the CW the benefit of the doubt. But, in the end, the numbers are the numbers. This morning I read in an article from David Goetzl from yesterday on Media Post titled Dawn Ostroff Transforms CW.
I finally figured out the secret of Dawn's success. The Force is with her, and she is skilled at Jedi Mind Tricks. It's like she pulls a stick out of the mud, holds it out and they see not a stick in the mud, but an ice cream cone. And they lap it up.
Impressive. It's a skill, perhaps Dawn's best skill. She is obviously a fantastic salesperson, and that's a wonderful skill to have if selling television advertising is the game.
The article cites two numbers which were among numbers we'd been looking to track down. One was that Gossip Girl is up 44% this year among women 18-34 and that the network wide, the CW is up 11% among women 18-34 this year. We still hope to do some sort of point-in-time season-to-date analysis on how that compares to the other networks (which I imagine is very favorably) soon. I don't think these numbers are to be sneezed at - it is progress.
But because I understand the overall numbers and how the percentages work, I also understand how tiny of an increase 11% among 18-34 year old women winds up being. But it's progress, and progress in the right direction if your goal is to target 18-34 year old females. I have no problem with that salesmanship.
I do however have a problem with this salesmanship:
Now, with wrestling gone, Ostroff said there is more of an opportunity to laser-focus on young women and build some programming flow across the week.
Oh REALLY? Because, you know, Everybody Hates Chris, and The Game and a repeat or whatever they stick in the Friday 9pm slot create so.much.flow. All wrestling being gone actually seems to have done was remove a million plus (1.27 million) 18-49 year olds from the weekly averages. I find it hard - approaching impossible -- to believe that the removal of Friday Night Smackdown! is a large contributor to the growth of Gossip Girl's 18-34 female viewing, yet its absence is the single largest contributor to the CW's decrease in 18-49 viewing.
My take? They see the same numbers we see and they are in damage control mode around losing Friday Night Smackdown! Or Dawn's drinking her own kool-aide. Take your pick. There's NO WAY an 11% network wide increase among 18-34 females (which is a tiny number in the absolute) is going to offset the 18-49 attrition where the CW is down 13.3% so far this season. That decrease is almost completely attributable to Friday Night Smackdown's exodus.
That's flow but it's in the wrong direction. In CW's defense, with the exception of CBS (and Univision, and of course now MNT which picked up Friday Night Smackdown!) the other nets are down similarly among 18-49 year olds and The CW is down the least (excluding Uni and MNT) among the aggregate 18-34 demo.
I don't fault the salesmanship, but the whole notion of flow coming out of Friday when you don't program nationally on Saturday or Sunday (at least when the year began) seems completely bogus. CW could have kept Friday Night Smackdown!, moved Everybody Hates Chris and The Game to Wednesdays paired with America's Next Top Model and been hardly the worse for wear among 18-34 year old females and been much, much better off with 18-49 year olds.
Do I think EHC and The Game are ideally paired with ANTM? No. But, the numbers indicate the approach would've worked much better. Sure, I have the benefit of hindsight, and I'll admit that's a huge advantage. I also lack Dawn's vision around the importance of "flow" coming out of Friday nights.
The CW, now with good programming Feng Shui.
OMFG!
well…maybe Dawn is programming a network for her own viewing – she doesn’t look like she watches the Thursday or Friday line-ups on CW…
ahhhhh – now i know what the CW will SOON stand for:
The “C”hicks & “W”omen network
Dawn Ostrich has her head in the sand.
Laser focus on young women? So why did they put on reruns of Jericho? Sure its a bit Gossip girlish early on but after episode 7, its all testosterone, guns and explosions. Maybe she will bring back Jericho, minus all the men? Except for Dale – because he is so smoking hot.
I love the CW thursday lineup, but it looks like CW hates it! The only thing good that that network has appealing to its target audience is Gossip Girl. All their other shows (I don’t watch One Tree Hill, so I don’t know about his one) are horrible!
Maybe she is trying to turn CW into a copy of Oxygen? Thats my theory and Im sticking with it. If so, change the name to WET – Womens Entertainment Television. With wet t-shirt contests and mud wrestling every Friday Night to get some men on board.
Why do you guys always focus on Dawn? It seems pretty sexist to me when you aren’t doing features on Ben Silverman, whose network is often competing with CW for better ratings. I hope there are at least 3 Silverman features in the works, including an Open Letter.
Oh, she’s drinking her own kool-aid for sure.
What I don’t understand, Robert, is how The CW has gone from “Free 2 Be Green” and “Free 2 Be Together” to “It’s all about the women, 18-34.”
I have a limited understanding of the numbers as it is, and I realize that advertisers want that demographic, but is it just me or is this strategy something straight out of Lifetime?! They’re not Lifetime, not in a long shot.
What really continues to irritate me is that they focus on women, but completely ignore their male audience in their “OMFG 8 Sub-headline” press releases, as if the male audience isn’t even important. But if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be doing damage control over the fact that they lost a show that could at least, on occasion, bring in somewhere near 4 million viewers every week, and how many of them were men?
It’s so sexist and disgusting.
I’ve left comments like this on your site before, but I have to do it again: What about shows like Smallville, which is currently in its eighth season bringing in an average of 4.15 million viewers a week (4.8 million with Live+7′s), yet they act like it doesn’t even exist half the time since they’re too busy focusing on their precious [and lame] Gossip Girl.
I don’t know what Dawn is smoking, but EHC, The Game and almost every other show besides ANTM, isn’t really bringing in money like Smallville is.
I’m so fired up about this that I can’t even forget the fact that they cancelled Everwood, which was one of their core mistakes (as well as cancelling Reba, which was another solid (based on the numbers they “like,”) performer, but I digress because that’s exactly what Dawn knows what to do!
Oh, and to Andrea: Why does Robert focus on Dawn Ostroff? Because she’s the PRESIDENT of The CW. If something fails, it’s HER fault and she better start getting that through her head too.
Andrea, We do Silverman:
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2008/11/18/ben-silverman-on-charlie-rose/8384
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2008/11/17/is-ben-silverman-at-nbc-riding-high-or-just-shifting-blame/8243
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2008/10/30/nbc-to-get-new-head-of-programming/7226
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2008/10/27/fortune-magazine-piece-on-nbcs-ben-silverman/6919
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2008/08/31/nbc-to-programming-execs-its-not-me-its-you/4862
Search is your friend….
As Bill notes, we do pick on Ben, and then after him probably Moonves and Zucker have gotten the most grief. We rarely pick on Mcpherson (ABC) or Reilly (FOX) because they aren’t usually out spinning yarns to the media (at least that we’ve seen). In fact, the only time we may have ever quoted Reilly was when Ben Silverman at a luncheon of network execs said “I date your children” and Reilly said, “I have boys.”
We wish he’d speak publicly more.
Man, that article contained so much spin, I feel like I’ve just come off the tilt-a-whirl. A couple of quotes from the article:
“That move came after the network finished the 2007-08 season. And even with the popular “Gossip Girl” launching, ratings were down some 36% in its target female 18-to-34 demo.”
“And the network overall is up 11% this season in the key demo.”
Okay, let’s do some math. If you’re down 36%, that’s going from 100 to 64. If you go up 11% from that, that’s going from 64 to 71. You’re still 29% down from where you started. Now, to be fair, a lot of that 36% drop was probably due to the writer’s strike messing up everything, but that fact makes the 11% increase even more pathetic.
But stuff like this still makes me scratch my head:
“Shows such as “90210″ and “Gossip Girl” generate significant time-shifted DVR viewing. Adult 18-to-49 ratings for “90210″ rise 60% when DVR viewing numbers over a seven-day period are added to the total; “Gossip Girl” figures increase 38%.”
That’s like a retailer trying to woo investors by saying, “Look guys, our retail sales are really low, but we’re very popular with people who want to come in just to look at the products we sell, then go buy them somewhere else”
You may post items about Ben, but I don’t see his botoxed face in the “Featured Story”.
Ben loves the media so I expect a good “Featured Story” in the future.
Your’re right about McPherson (he must be a ghost) and Reilly does once in the while, usually around May
And Robert is quite correct in that he *is* easier on Dawn that I’d be. Had Robert not had time today to write this post here would have been my bullet points on Dawn’s season:
1. Successes: 90210, 18-34 women
2. Failures: 18-49 adults, Stylista
3. Catastrophes: Entire Friday night, Entire Sunday night
Edit: Andrea, make no mistake, most of those Silverman posts were Featured at the time.
Dawn needed to be fired yesterday.
David — the 36% decrease was from the beginning of the year until the end of the year BUT was just for one show (Gossip Girl). the 11% increase this year over last year is network wide across all shows (assuming the data is correct — i didn’t actually see it yet).
Andrea, Ben has been featured but if your suggestion is that the reason Dawn gets featured *more* is because she’s easier on the eyes, it isn’t so (it is so she’s easier on the eyes, but that’s not why she gets featured more).
Bill, relative to the CW’s 18-49 numbers 90210 is a success and even relative to its 18-34 female numbers. But the expectations were so high, I have to believe that 90210 has been a bit of a disappointment. But if success relative to Privileged (and especially stylista) is the metric…it’s a success.
Correct me if I’m wrong but the CW is making more money with Chris/Game because their ad revenue is higher than Smackdown. I dont have the numbers right know but Smackdown was only making 25k for a 30 seconds ad.
I’d give her the programming flow thing, if she was running CBS, where apparently everything that doesn’t “flow” like Jericho or Moonlight isn’t working, but on her network everything that is working is going against the very flow she seeks to create.
Cool, EHC and The Game were not kept for reasons of “making more money”.
Maybe $indication money? I think Dawn should develop a procedural with teenagers, all their programs are serials.
Cool, my point is this: EHC and The Game also don’t really target the 18-34 year old females who watch Gossip Girl and One Tree Hill (or Supernatural and Smallville, for that matter). I didn’t put it in the post, but I think it more likely that the reason EHC and The Game are on Fridays and Smackdown is gone is because of (the now failed) plans with Sunday meant they couldn’t air EHC and The Game. I believe there was pressure for the CW to keep the urban comedies and if there was no Sunday (and since CW doesn’t program nationally on Saturday) Friday was the only place to put them…but Friday Night Smackdown was there — but no political pressure to keep it.
It’s purely speculative, but I think it more likely those issues account for what happened with Friday nights than “flow”.
Okay, I did a quick search and I saw that Ben’s botoxed face was featured in November. However, that sickening pic of Dawn with the green CW in the background comes up 3 times since summer.
So, Bill, why is CW featured more? Because you get more of their press releases?