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in the afternoons
'Port Charles's' novella style pulls in the young
By Kevin Downey
For both viewers and advertisers, daytime television has long been the ugly stepchild to primetime and sports TV.
So it was only a matter of time before the networks would decide to revive the genre, and not just to halt the slide in viewers.
The networks, led by NBC, saw it as a chance to actually bring in a new generation of younger viewers whom media buyers so frequently court.
NBC is credited with starting the daytime revival with its demon and witch-populated "Passions."
The soap helped push NBC to its first-ever tie for No. 1 in daytime last spring.
And now ABC is having its own rebound with younger viewers, largely on the strength of its still low-rated but growing "Port Charles," which spun off from "General Hospital" in 1997 and was reworked into 13-week storylines in December 2000.
"All three networks are trying to reach the young demographic because that’s how commercial time is sold," explains Felicia Minei Behr, senior vice president of ABC daytime programming.
"People in that age group are more willing to try a new toothpaste or hair gel or other products than somebody who is over 50. So the younger viewers are the golden audience."
Although the women 18-49 rating for "Port Charles" is still half that for daytime’s highest-rated program, NBC’s "Days of Our Lives," it’s up 10 percent for the week ending Jan. 25, compared to the same time last year.
Its rating for women 18-24 is up about 325 percent and its rating for women 18-34 is up 48 percent.
ABC’s overall rating for the first four weeks of the year is flat for women 18-49 with a 2.4 and 15 share to NBC’s 2.4/14 and CBS’s 2.3/14. But ABC’s women 18-34 rating is up 6 percent to a 1.9, compared to NBC’s 2.9 and CBS’s 2.0.
The significance of reaching the younger demographic is twofold.
ABC is establishing what could be an audience that sticks around for years in a daypart best known for its migration to cable and into the job market.
Behr says that daytime programmers are no longer able to count on a multigenerational audience to bring in new viewers.
"As the years have gone by, we have had mothers who mentored in their children," she says.
"As our audience has gone out to the workforce, this mentoring has stopped to a great extent. So it falls upon us to figure out a way to inform this audience and bring them back to daytime and to capture their imagination and loyalty."
The daytime audience is also still important to advertisers, who rely on it to reach the women who make many of the purchasing decisions for their families.
The younger audience represents a group who will eventually grow into that category, most often defined as the 18- to 49 or 25- to 54-year-old demographics.
"Daytime is still important for marketing plans," says Susan Hanjy, broadcast research manager at GSD&M.
"It sometimes gets lost because it doesn’t have a lot of the pizazz or recognition that primetime or sports offers. But it’s there everyday and if you are a viewer, you’re a loyal viewer, which is important for packaged goods and it’s as important for branding as it is for moving product."
ABC’s approach to reaching those viewers with "Port Charles" is a programming style that draws comparisons to the novellas that make up primetime on Spanish-language networks, like Univision and Telemundo.
"Port Charles" has an abbreviated story arc that the network calls books or chapters. The cast is littered with college-age kids. And the stories on the half-hour show are as often about aliens and angels visiting earth as they are about adultery and betrayal.
The benefit to ABC and the other networks is that this new style has worked to pull in a young audience.
The risk is that younger viewers are seasonal because of school. And the shorter storylines mean that the network has to work a bit harder to keep viewers coming back.
It’s a risk that Behr says is working for now.
"You take a chance with any storyline and you certainly take a chance with a telenovella," she says.
"We really have to consider each chapter very carefully because there is a larger risk in that than in the normal soap, which can get out of a specific story faster."
February 4, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Kevin Downey is a staff writer for Media Life.
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