Panelists: Cable TV is so old media

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There’s nothing quite like having a roomful of entertainment-industry movers and shakers to suggest that you’re old.

It happened at a PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Entertainment Outlook conference in West Hollywood on Tuesday, when four members of the so-called Net generation trotted onstage to talk media consumption, particularly their wayward Web-surfing habits, before a graying crowd of entertainment-industry-executive types.

Spurred by a moderator and audience members posing queries as if they were anthropologists facing an unknown tribe, the panelists detailed the number of hours they spend online per day (nearly all of them), media content sites they frequent (as one said, ‘I heart Hulu’) and their take on online advertising (make it better).

Asked what effect the financial crisis had on them, one cited the absence of investment-bank recruiters on his UC campus, and two acknowledged budgeting more carefully. One, of course, said that most people he knows ‘have hardly noticed.’ (An audience member mumbled that that could be only because he was too young to have a 401[k].)

The demographic bracket bandied about during the conversation, and the one that seemed to apply to all four panelists, was 18 to 25. I ask — having recently skidded out of that demo — whatever happened to 18 to 34? Isn’t that whom advertisers really want to reach?

The older half of that broader demo, the panel would have us believe, apparently doesn’t watch television online or on cellphones. That glib pronouncement ignored the fact that the next set of panelists — some of whom might have been older than 34 — were behind technology to allow those very trends to evolve, albeit not as quickly as the kids wished.

And sure, most of this is sour grapes from a recently arrived old-timer, but at least MTV agrees with me. The latest study by MTV Networks International’s advertising and marketing division, released Tuesday, found that 25-to-34-year-olds are ‘still actively and emotionally connected to youth culture’ but ‘largely ignored by marketers and advertisers.’

Or maybe 27-year-old MTV just knows that it’s skidding out of the prime demo too.

-- Swati Pandey