A House Divided
The New York Times reports:
“Nickelodeon is expected to announce today that Noggin, the daytime commercial-free preschool network, and the N, a nighttime advertising-supported network for adolescents and teenagers, will become 24-hour stand-alone networks and no longer share channel space.”
This is huge news. The marriage between Noggin and the N has always been a bit rickety. By giving the N its wings, Viacom, its parent company, is making a committed play for the tween market. The N’s programming will benefit mightily from this new level of focus, as will its advertising revenue.
Now that the network can sell the valuable before school slots, previously occupied by Noggin’s commercial free pre-school programming, they’ll be able to provide advertisers a level of access not available on Disney, ABC Family or Nickelodeon.
The Times article sites questions by industry analysts over how the N will be able to attract new viewers “by expanding into what are essentially school hours, with reruns of programs including “Drake and Josh” and “The Amanda Show.”
These analyst forget that kids can record shows aired while they’re at school to watch later. What they don’t record, they can watch on the web. Programming is no longer time specific and network driven, it’s fluid and viewer defined. Commercials, product placement and sponsored event based programming will all play a much larger role in the N’s viewer strategies and I expect to see major innovation in all three of these areas.
The assumption that this At School slot will continue to be filled with reruns also misses the fact that the school year is seasonal and broken up by vacation periods. On average, middle school aged kids spend about four and a half months of the year on vacation from school. If the N is smart, which they are, they’ll start developing cheap to produce reality and non-traditional programming based on the themes of their successful primetime shows. These new shows would then be shown in marathon blocks during vacation periods and over the weekends.
The N is also uniquely positioned to dabble in user generated content, given that its target market is among the largest demographic posting videos to YouTube. Now that cross pollination from the tween world’s more explicit content into the squeaky clean pre-school world, will no longer have be a consideration, the N can let loose, to a degree, with how it positions itself to kids.
The best way to do this is to allow the network to become a reflective wall where kids can throw up their video tags, de-contextualize their game avatars and scream their tastemaker rants at each other and the world. To do this the N will have to find a way to become the first cable network to truly bridge the gap between web and television. MTV is trying, but they’ve been stymied by their muddled demorgraphic’s widely varied relationship to the web.
The new N will provide us with our first real view into tweens’ relationship with entertainment. What role will emerging technology play for a demographic that takes it for granted. For a tween there is no experiential dissonance between a show watched on a phone, a laptop or a television. With it’s new position in the market the N has the potential to usurp MTV as television’s bleeding edge. I am extremely excited to see what they come up with.
