Data Shows Cable TV News Doesn't Have a Big Advertiser Conflict Problem
A look at ad trends for cable news in prime time during an election year reveals broad advertiser support, does it also say something about the electorate?
But CNN"s Third Place Position Might Say Something About America's Appetite for The Middle Ground
It’s election week in America! That means by Wednesday you can stop getting flooded with direct mail, $11.6B worth of political TV ads and the relentless text messages from politicians you can’t seem to block. Which is good.
But the spin won’t stop, nor will the sources of corruption driving the politics of our great country.
In search of a scapegoat, people like to blame the media for where we are. Soundbite journalism and stories about one horrible crime or sensational story often take precedence over the focus on deep investigative journalism about the systematic problems at the root. And while some of it is totally fair criticism, much of it is misplaced. News is crunched by fragmented attention eating away at attention share, walled gardens with personalized algorithms and just more stuff to pay attention to—so the media has to balance what’s important to know with what people will actually pay, click and subscribe to. It’s messy and complicated.
I wondered, however, just how much ad dollars are influencing coverage this election cycle. So, I took to the iSpot dashboard to investigate, from Sept. 1 to Oct. 31, just how much our primetime cable cohorts might be co-opted by big pharma, big oil, big insurance and big tech—only to find a better-than-expected scenario.
Turns out each network has a broad mix of industries and brands supporting news coverage. The data shows it’s reasonable to deduce that no single advertiser or category invests enough to have a big sway on what these newsrooms cover.
That doesn’t mean holding companies run themselves free of ownership agendas and political considerations not seen on TV, of course—just follow the “60 Minutes” conversation and it’s scary. However, the evidence shows that , cable news ad inventory looks a lot like all of TV, only with much less fast food than other programming genres and currently, much more window installation services (going hard in time for Super El Niño, but I digress).
There was one other finding that ran contrary to the memes of the day that say the Republican faithful have lost enthusiasm. While Tuesday night will reveal if that is true or not, one thing we don’t have to wait to know is that, despite recent ratings declines, Fox News continues to pummel the primetime cable news competition, with 60% of ad revenue since Sept. 1 and 64% of ad reach. Its reach into living rooms remains supreme.
What surprised me is how the remaining viewership was split — 22% for MSNow and just 14% for CNN, which purports to be the middle.
Does that mean the left and center are just less likely to watch cable news? Probably. Fox News viewers tend to be older, TV-always-on types. And there are lots of nuanced cultural reasons why these numbers are the numbers.
Notwithstanding, the 14% share in the category does portend a potential crisis for leaders at CNN, where balancing political perspectives in roundtable formats just isn’t keeping America as engaged.
And that kinda sucks. Not because I love CNN per se (though John King is an electoral map legend), but because with all the fragmentation of media, these stats might suggest a bigger problem.
Americans are now consuming algorithms of perspectives they want and not engaging in content they disagree with but can grow from. And, it turns out, collectively gobbling short-form clips of things we are interested in like the Cookie Monster might come at the cost of mostly ignoring all the crazy things both parties and we, the people, are accountable for.
On Tuesday we will have some incremental change in one way or another. But will it be the kind of change we need to bring vibrance back to the reasonable middle and infuse a sense of respect for all view points and shared responsibility for tackling the hard issues of our times?
Sorry, I’ve got alerts coming in for reels some friends just sent from Halloween, so I don’t have time to guess.
