The Adults 18-34 Primer, Part 2: Which Shows Skew 18-34?

Last time, the adults 18-34 primer began by introducing the 18-34 audience, from its potential importance in ratings analysis to how often it watches TV in the broadest senses compared to the larger 18-49 demo. This time, the focus shifts to what people really care about: individual shows!

There are really two ways of incorporating a new rating into the conversation. We can just stay on the paradigm we all know pretty well (18-49 ratings) and use 18-34 to color around it, or we can dive right in with a formula that combines them into one all-new, grand unified metric. I think the first approach is more practical, more useful as a starting point, and (with how relatively little we have to go on) probably more mathematically sound for now. So that's what this post will try to accomplish. In the last post, we'll take an unscientific stab at the other approach.

This post examines a selection of broadcast shows using their 18-34 ratings as a percentage of their 18-49 ratings (what we called "34/49" in the first post). Basically, the higher a show is listed in this article, the more the 18-34 might "help" what we think of as its 18-49 ratings situation. It shouldn't be looked at as a hierarchy of strength on its own. You can skew heavily toward 18-34 by percentage but still have weak overall volume. Think of it not as a "How strong is this show?" metric, but a "How much might 18-34 ratings help this show?" metric.

On the Numbers Used

A couple other notes: just so we don't get too repetitive, I will mostly be talking about big shows in a big picture way in this post. I'll use A18-49+, an 18-34 version of Plus, and the labels that come with those numbers to sort shows in very broad strokes. The next post will be more of a drill-down into marginal/bubble shows, making the usual adjustments for timeslot seen in the True formula.

The "A18-34+" stat is exactly what you'd think: the historical-adjusted statistic A18-49+, except it compares 18-34 ratings to the 18-34 league average. Since I don't have 18-34 for the full season, what I did was use the 34/49 ratio for the episodes I do have, compare that to the league average, and apply that ratio to the full season A18-49+ (thru March 9). So it's more of a projection of the full season than a hard number, but it should be pretty close.

And finally: the most important thing you need to remember about the first post is the average ratio between entertainment 18-34 ratings and 18-49 ratings on the big four networks: 71%. That's the standard all the 34/49 numbers will be compared against.

The Triple-Digits Club (over 100% 34/49 ratio)

There are exactly seven shows on the big four networks with a higher 18-34 rating average than 18-49 rating average. And as of February, they all air on two nights on the same network.

	34/49	A18-49+	A18-34+
American Dad!	112%	100	157
Family Guy	111%	125	197
The Mindy Project	109%	71	109
Bob's Burgers	108%	93	142
New Girl	107%	91	137
Glee	102%	74	106
The Simpsons	100%	126	178

A 100%+ ratio is enough with a decent-sized show to impact the Plus by more than a full label. The Simpsons and Family Guy are borderline hits in 18-49 but creeping up on megahits in 18-34! The second-tier animated shows come in right around the league average in 18-49 but are borderline big hits in 18-34!

And while I promised I wouldn't talk about bubble shows, I do want to note that from this table you can at least start to see where Fox is coming from with shows like Glee and The Mindy Project. They're on the flop borderline in 18-49 but actually above the league average in 18-34.

The Second-Tier Comedies (90-100% 34/49 ratio)

Outside of Fox's big seven, there are only five other shows on the big four that even break a 90% ratio:

	34/49	A18-49+	A18-34+
Community	100%	57	81
Parks and Recreation	95%	62	83
How I Met Your Mother	94%	162	214
Brooklyn Nine-Nine	93%	78	103
The Bachelor	92%	133	172

We're still in a territory where this kind of ratio can make you a vastly different player in 18-34. Community and Parks are miles behind the 18-49 league average, but make up over half that distance in 18-34. How I Met Your Mother goes from squarely a big hit to squarely a megahit. And Brooklyn Nine-Nine ekes past the league average.

A quick note on How I Met Your Mother: when you get to the last section of this post, it will really drill home what an incredible anomaly HIMYM is within the context of its network. It has a 34/49 ratio of 94%, but there are only two other shows on the entire network that even go above the 71% league average! (Those would be 2 Broke Girls (74%), which quite possibly only gets there because it has HIMYM as a lead-in, and Hostages (74%).) As we'll see later, the vast majority of shows on the network fall somewhere in the fifties. How I Met Your Mother is completely on an island on CBS.

While HIMYM's great skew does translate somewhat - HIMYM scores more $ per A18-49 point than almost anything else on CBS - the show is still slightly below the league average $/A18-49 across all five networks, when it should probably be at least somewhat above. There could be any number of other reasons for this (maybe it's not strong enough in an individual gender), but it also makes me wonder if a factor in some of these rates is a larger network reputation. In other words, CBS' reputation as a very old-skewing network prevents the show from being a truly elite advertiser draw, even though its individual raw rating numbers say it should be one. Just a theory, and one that may not really matter beyond this season. Outliers of HIMYM's ilk are quite rare.

The CW (90-100%)

Almost everything on the 18-34-lovin' CW also falls roughly in the nineties, making the network more competitive with (but still well behind) the big four by that standard. Their five early renewals all ranged from 88-101:

	34/49	A18-49+	A18-34+
The Vampire Diaries	101%	54	78
The Originals	92%	49	63
Supernatural	91%	53	69
Arrow	90%	50	63
Reign	88%	32	39

...with a few of the marginal shows falling just outside of that range. We'll save those for next time!

Big Events (85-95%)

Let's take a quick step outside of the entertainment series realm and look at some of those big events that bring massive amounts of 18-49 adults to the TV. Almost all of them do a significantly better job (relative to entertainment series) bringing in 18-34 adults:

	34/49	A18-49+	A18-34+
Super Bowl	96%	2003	2707
Grammy Awards	92%	505	653
Academy Awards	89%	668	833
NFC Championship Game	88%	969	1199
Golden Globe Awards	86%	331	402
Sunday Night Football	85%	404	486
Winter Olympics	72%	271	275

Most of these events are in a tight range. A big exception to this is the Winter Olympics, which are much closer to the league average. I've hypothesized since February that the Olympics are demographically more like entertainment programming than sports like, say, the NFL. There were a couple reasons for this: 1) Overall viewing didn't really go up during the Olympic weeks, implying that most of the Olympic audience would normally be watching something else on TV; and 2) The few originals that aired against the Olympics got slammed, even though the Olympics weren't that big. I mean, Sunday/Monday shows go up against even higher-rated football in the fall and don't seem that much weaker than when there's no football.

The above table is a third piece of evidence supporting that theory: the Olympics' 18-34 skew is almost exactly in line with the entertainment league average. So it seems feasible that the Olympics are largely sucking their audience off the similar-skewing other networks, while the other big events are bringing in a crowd that's not that representative of the primetime norm. That could be part of why the networks largely avoid the Olympics like the plague, even though the ratings weren't that incredible.

The Top Dramas (80-90%)

Beyond what we've covered, there are only a handful of other series that even break 80%, which would seem to be roughly the threshold where you have enough 18-34 skew for it to maybe start mattering. These female-friendly dramas are the most notable ones:

	34/49	A18-49+	A18-34+
Scandal	87%	155	190
Parenthood	85%	65	78
Grey's Anatomy	82%	139	162
Law and Order: SVU	81%	91	103

Scandal and Grey's in particular were shows whose ad rates overachieved their A18-49 ratings. These shows are only somewhat stronger in A18-34+, but they surely get an even bigger bump in the female half of the demo.

There's then a small cluster of comedies that break into the low 80's, but most of those would seem to be too far off the 18-49 map (Mixology (84%), Super Fun Night (82%)), on a network with too high 18-34 standards (Dads (81%)), or both (Raising Hope (81%)) for this small bit of help to matter.

About Average (60-80%)

It feels like we've covered a lot of territory, but it's really just a small percentage of the big four's programming. If your show hasn't been mentioned yet, it's unlikely that the 18-34 skew is helping it out in any meaningful way. Here's a selection of notable shows of all shapes and sizes that are within roughly ten percentage points of that 71% league average.

	34/49	A18-49+	A18-34+
Bones	77%	93	100
Once Upon a Time	76%	113	122
Modern Family	75%	184	195
The Voice Mon Fall	74%	204	213
2 Broke Girls	74%	135	140
Shark Tank	74%	100	104
Sleepy Hollow	73%	133	137
American Idol Wed	73%	168	172
Agents of SHIELD	69%	132	128
The Big Bang Theory	69%	267	259
The Blacklist	66%	151	141
Dancing with the Stars Fall	62%	110	96

Most of CBS (50-60%)

Every network has at least one show that goes well above that 71% league average ratio. But one network's got a monopoly on the ones well below it: CBS. Only one show on the other four networks combined even goes below 60%: poor The Neighbors at 57%.

	34/49	A18-49+	A18-34+
Criminal Minds	62%	129	112
Mike and Molly	61%	117	100
Two and a Half Men	59%	115	96
The Amazing Race Fall	59%	102	85
The Good Wife	58%	75	61
NCIS	55%	153	118
NCIS: Los Angeles	53%	128	96
Person of Interest	50%	103	73
Survivor Fall	49%	125	87

NCIS is hoping to hang onto another season as a big hit in A18-49+, but it's not even a hit by 18-34 standards! And Person of Interest, a solid, league average show, is on the flop borderline using A18-34+. While the reality is not nearly as harsh as mere A18-34+ ratings would indicate, this tendency is definitely reflected in the ad rates; virtually everything on CBS gets fewer ad dollars per 18-49 point than the average broadcast show. This is a key part of why a hybrid between the two ratings shows the best correlation with ad rates. Not only does it help many of the high-ratio shows look better, but it brings the CBS shows down a peg.

Though this means the CBS model may not be quite as stout as it looks using just 18-49 ratings, this whole thing really only matters in the larger "state of the networks" picture. Fortunately for the individual shows, they're competing against other shows on the same network, and all the other CBS shows skew far away from 18-34 as well. That's why all this 18-34 stuff ultimately doesn't add that much to our assessment of marginal shows. There are big differences when you look "inter-network," which I tried to illustrate in this post, but on an "intra-network" basis, the networks are pretty cohesive in an 18-34 sense. To sum it up quite simply: Fox and CW have almost all the really heavy 18-34-skewing shows, CBS has almost all the light 18-34-skewing shows, and almost everything on ABC/NBC falls fairly close to the middle.

The cases of sizable intra-network 18-34 differences among shows on the margins are relatively rare. But there are a few of them. How much difference does it make? That's a surface we'll try to scratch next time.