Men are becoming disaffected with TV, which is largely aimed at women in the 25 to 39 age group who advertisers perceive to be the primary consumers, according to TV research group Audience Development Australia.
And men are not just reducing their mainstream TV consumption but zoning out when they do watch, according to ADA managing director, David Castran.
The group’s latest annual survey of 6,500 viewers found men tend to watch TV just to keep their partners company.
Castran says men are “companion viewers” rather than the main viewer because most TV outside of sport is aimed at women and adds that assuming women make all the household purchasing decisions is a mistake.
“It’s not as cut and dried as that. For example, groceries tend to be a shared purchasing decision,” Castran says. “Beer, spirits and fast food all target men but if men aren’t concentrating on the TV they won’t concentrate on ads.”
Mars/Venus CEO, Bec Brideson, has built an agency around the analysis of men’s and women’s media consumption and says men are also becoming harder to reach via traditional media channels, as their consumption of electronic games, pay TV and DVDs continues to rise.
She says marketers wanting to engage male TV watchers should focus on sport.
“Men watch TV for sport. They read the paper from front to back and if sport was the first thing on the news, they would switch off after that,” she says.
But figures from Nielsen Media Research show the TV viewing habits of younger men compared to older men are poles apart.
In July The Simpsons, Sports Tonight and Just Shoot Me were the top shows among 18-24-year-old males. There were similarities between the 25-39 and the 40-59 categories, with The Grand Prix, Formula 1,Bathurst and other motorsports scoring highly in both age groups. The over 55s, however, had very different preferences, with New Inventors, The 7.30 Report, ABC News and golf coming out top.
Roy Morgan research confirms men are consuming less mainstream TV than women. Overall, men make up just 41% of heavy TV watchers (more than four hours per day) and 49% of medium TV watchers (two to four hours per day), although they are more likely to have watched pay TV in the past seven days, making up 53% of regular viewers.
Publishers are seizing on this trend and trying to tempt men into increasing magazine consumption.
News Magazines is broadly targeting male readers and recently launched a new title called Alpha, which has seized on Australian men’s love of sport, using the tagline ‘It’s sport and it’s personal’ and is hoping to give Emap’s top-selling title FHM a run for its money.
Holden, L’Oréal, Nissan, Clinique, Schwarzkopf and Asics are among the advertisers to have committed $2.3m to Alpha, according to News Magazines managing director, Phil Barker, who is confident the magazine—which retails for $2—will make $7m in its first financial year.
But Brideson says despite all the grand predictions, Alpha may be missing the mark.
“It is a fabulous idea on paper but some advertisers I have spoken to feel it hasn’t delivered in terms of editorial content and it could be because men like their sport news current and that’s hard to deliver in a magazine,” she says.
There are conflicting figures as to the success of the major men’s titles. Emap Australia executive publishing director, Geoff Campbell, said recently that advertising sales for his group’s leading men’s magazine FHM had never been healthier, quoting a 19% rise in ad revenue to $7.5m in the year to March 2005, representing a share of 37.5%.
But the figures marketers are really interested in—readership figures—show FHM dropped 2.4% in the year to June 2005 and rival Ralph shed 15%. One explanation could be that men are spreading their magazine consumption across several titles rather than remaining loyal to one.
Roy Morgan data shows men make up 40% of heavy magazine consumers (reading five or more magazines) and 51% of medium magazine consumers (two to four magazines) and they are dominating the newspaper category, being 54% of heavy newspaper readers and 51% of medium newspaper readers, as well as being the primary users of the internet.
According to client services manager of advertising agency and online marketing consultancy, Freestyle Media, Matt Bateman, men purchase online more readily than women.
“Men go to specific sites and tend to surf less and if they get a site they are comfortable with or get a referral, they purchase more frequently than women online so they are valuable to online marketers,” he says.
