Garden TV Revisited

Well, there’s yet another brouhaha in the garden blog world about the lack of garden television. It must be one of those “slow news days” to get everybody on the rip again. Joe Lamp’l (who I admire) weighs is here in a guest post on the Casual Gardener. and Garden Rant is taking HGTV on again.

I’m no marketer but I understand that marketers put their money and resources where they will get the most bang for their buck (don’t we all). Again, my understanding is that it is far easier to reach an 18-25 year old and convince them to use your brand (they’re just starting out and making brand choices) than it is to convince older groups to switch brands (either because they formed brand loyalty when they were younger or because they have a ton more experience on which to rely). So given a choice, marketers aim for younger markets because it gives them a better result with their resources.

This is particularly galling for those of us who have passed that age-range. It is particularly troublesome for some boomers (and now Gen-Xers) to realize that their prime days of being the center of the marketing universe are long gone, dead and over like last year’s squash vine.

And yes, focus groups tell us we want to be spoken to by distinct personality types. I don’t know if you know this but there’s one (at least) company in the U.S. that does surveys on the response rates to all celebrities, can quantify those numbers and rank the “salability” of that celebrity to specific demographic groups. So they know the demographic that respond to particular celebrities. You’ll see the best examples of this during the political campaigns when politicians will trot out one celebrity to appear with them at this locale with this age-range while an entirely different celebrity will appear later that same day in a different demographic group. This is not by accident.

So is it any wonder that television companies look for spokespeople and presenters that talk to the generation being marketed to. If you get x response from some 60-year old guy and x+30 response from a 25-year old hottie – who do you think the advertiser is going to put money behind?

So when you get over that advertiser-hill so do your spokespeople. Heck, Steppenwolf is now elevator-music. What do you expect? Boomers will soon start wobbling along in their walkers in retirement homes to “Born to be Wild” in low volume from the facility speakers.

But I digress. We garden writer types like to trot out our tv-producer stories and I’ve never forgotten one from 15 years or so ago when an up-and-coming producer (now very successful) told me that garden tv was boring and badly produced. There was only one that was even shot properly (Martha Stewart) with proper lighting and decent graphics. . He also pointed out that none of them were using up-to-date and readily accessible technologies of time-motion or other interesting photography or even outstanding editing. It was mostly long, monotonous shots of people digging and talking. He didn’t want to even think about asking his advertising people for assistance to produce or market one.

But again, I digress. Garden tv is just another medium in transition – add it to newspaper, book and magazine economic-models that are changing underneath us. So I can’t get excited about traditional garden tv not being the same or disappearing – add it to the list.

Bottom line. If those involved in making and producing conventional garden tv think there’s a conventional market for this – they should fund it themselves and buy the time on the channel. Make it work yourself the way it “should” be done. Alternately, take it to the Net like a lot of writers and photographers have done. There’s a ton of models for this kind of information-exchange. And it probably is the future.

If you’re a gardener who wants garden tv, then it’s up to you in this day and age to talk to those like Joe and convince him to give you what you want in a way you can use it. Promise you’ll pay him directly to produce his shows.

You can decide to complain about what was or you can be part of a process to what will be.

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