Every year I spend a few weeks in the USA with my wife. This is due to some sort of perversion I have which is yet unnamed — its basis is a love of small town America and country music. But one of the benefits of being there is that one sees the world that is precisely one season ahead of South Africa.
So the newest TV shows, the latest magazine trends, the programming tricks the networks are getting up to, the biggest movies (and the clothing fashions, for the wife) are all on display.
As I did last year, I thought I’d share some of these, courtesy mainly of USA Today.
In the magazine market the hot number is weekly celebrity magazines, which is represented in South Africa by titles like People and Heat. In the US they tend to break into two neat groups. First is the “under-the-skin-of-celebrities” type, serving up short trivia about celebs’ doings, love lives, and style. The newest, Inside!, is at one end of the spectrum — it deals only with the positive, and has no scandal, sex, or dirt. The other group is the plethora of “how-the-stars-live” titles, also with very positive slants. So titles like Weekly Lifestyle and Celebrity Living now have their niches carved out.
Star searches on television a la American Idol have ensured music sales are as buoyant as ever. Mariah Carey hit number one with a weekly sale of over 400,000 copies, which is indicative of one huge market. One of the interesting marketing facts is that album sales in the US are down 8% on 2004, but digital sales are sizzling. A weekly download of over 50,000 of a single track was recently reported, and I can confidently predict that the lifetime of the pre-recorded CD purchase is rapidly drawing to an end, condemned by technology.
In television there are a couple of interesting developments, but overall the real-life drama genre continues to dominate. And the fad of it is that if you have a successful formula, you duplicate it, or even triplicate it. So CSI is now triplets, and Law & Order too (or is it quads?).
There is not one comedy show in the top 10. The highest rated of the genre is 2½ Men, now here, and Everybody Loves Raymond, at positions 11 and 12 respectively. While I was there, however, the final episode of Raymond flighted, leaving a huge gap.
The biggest new show? In the genre of Lost, CSI and X-Files comes the 2005 version of para-reality. A bit dark, a bit sombre, a supernatural/religious thriller called Revelations. It has to be the season’s hottest thing, attracting a 15,6-million audience – 40% up on what West Wing attracted on average.
So the US media scene is pretty buoyant. But perhaps the weirdest thing one picked up in USA Today was how the media was treating the Iraqi War. Tonally it was very much matter-of-fact, and part of life. The first overt mention that the nation was indeed at war was on page 10 of the newspaper. Very sad.
Harry Herber is group managing director of the MediaShop.