Boomers Driving New Wave Of Cord-Cutting

COMMENTARY

• by Mario Carrasco , Columnist, Yesterday

Millennials have been ruining everything for the past five years. From the workplace to grocery stores, Millennials have been blamed for every marketers’ woes imaginable in the past decade. However, there’s a new disruptor in town, and they’re older: Boomers. Millennials have blamed them for almost everything as well but let’s not get into that. 

In our 2018 Total Market Media report, we found that Boomers are disrupting something that they aren’t typically credited for, live TV. An audience that marketers have relied on for tuning in for their regularly scheduled programs are now taking the leap into streaming like their younger counterparts: 

While Millennial Live TV viewing habits are continuing to decline from 2017 (-16 points), Boomers’ decline in live TV viewing habits are significantly higher with a 21-point decline from 2017.

So, what’s driving this? The answer is clear — Netflix. No longer does the stereotype of the binge-viewing Millennial hold true, Boomers are getting into the non-action action of binge viewing with a 13-point jump in Netflix viewing over 2017. To say that this is a significant increase over Millennials in the same time is an understatement as Millennial adoption of Netflix saw a slight decrease in 2018 from 2017 with a drop of 2 points. Now we know who the almost 2 million new U.S. Netflix subscribers in Q1 of 2018 are. 

Boomers are moving from Live TV to streaming, so what are the implications for marketers? 

1. OTT Advertising No Longer Just For Millennials – with the significant increase of OTT services like Netflix by boomers, OTT advertising is no longer relegated to just targeting millennials. Boomers are a growing audience in the OTT advertising space and present a first-to-market opportunity for marketers to engage in this medium.

2. Audience Classification Becomes More Complex – The formula of Live TV = Older audiences, OTT = Younger audiences is rapidly becoming antiquated. With Boomers driving cord-cutting and OTT adoption, all bets are off in terms of marketers classifying certain mediums for certain age cohorts. Audience classification will increasingly become a multidimensional practice, going beyond standard demos and assumptions.

3. OTT Needs To Go Beyond Impressions – As OTT audiences grow in scope and reach, OTT operators will need to move beyond the standard television model of impressions and adopt other metrics such as user interactions, leads, and acquisitions. 

OTT is here to stay, and live TV is experiencing an existential crisis as even their tried and true audience is favoring streaming services such as Netflix. Marketers must adapt yet again to not only changing technologies but changing demographics on said technologies. Netflix eclipsing Disney’s market cap doesn’t sound so absurd now, right?