People have been trying to make excuses for the failure of Katie Couric to increase ratings by drawing attention away from her to Brian Williams. The story being stated points out that Couric has lost 40 percent less viewers than Williams has since the time she was hired to anchor CBS (CBS-A) News.
From an advertising viewpoint, it really doesn't matter, as advertisers view the three newscasts as one. The reason why is they all have the same demographic, which averages about 60 years in age. Because there's no difference, they simply buy it as if it was a bloc, rather than looking at them as individual buys. In other words, the newcasts are commodities from that standpoint.
While the number of viewers will dictate the price for the individual networks, overall they are looked at as the same.
The point is, advertisers don't care who's reading the lines to the viewers. The entire market pretty much stays the same at about 24 million, no matter who sits in the chairs. All that happens is when anchors are changed, viewers may gravitate toward another channel. For advertisers it's irrelevant.
The hiring of Couric with the thought that she would draw more viewers to watch the news at that time of day was based upon faulty assumptions and research. People are consuming their news much more online these days, and prefer it that way. Trying to add what they thought was a superstar to the mix was never going to change the way people were going to get their news.
CBS deserves what they got because of what to me was over-marketing Couric, giving her the huge salary, and bringing in her entourage, which caused a lot of resentment among workers.
From a business standpoint, this was always a bad move, similar to the outrageous deals made by the satellite radio companies with celebrities that have resulted in such poor financial performance.
The idea that it isn't poor Katie's fault and people continually writing to stick up for her is misplaced. She was a big girl when she signed the deal, and should have known what she was stepping into. Nothing will hurt her though, she's going to get paid her $15 million-a-year.
When you come down to it, Katie deserves every bit of the scrutiny she's getting. Brian Williams and Charles Gibson don't make anywhere near the money she's making, and they draw a far larger audience. If CBS and Couric had no plan in place, or the data to back it up to increase viewer numbers, they deserve every bit of the criticism they recieve.
Hopefully the industry has learned they don't need superstars to read the ticker. Even though CBS will get their advertising money by default, their ROI for the newscast will be far less than their competitors who remained much more fiscally responsible.
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