One of my favorite ads of late is the Hulu.com ad featuring Alec Baldwin--a 40-50-something pitching online TV viewing, not to the 18-24 crowd, but to Baby boomers.
Hulu.com's strategy of attracting attention through media coverage has drawn a viewing audience that is on average much older than those of other streaming-video sites. That's a good thing right?
This was not the case with Hulu.com. When the company launched its public site last March, the largest age group visiting the site were those Internet visitors over 55 years old, accounting for 47% of all site visits, while traditionally younger early adopters accounted for only 17% of traffic.
What's even more interesting is that traffic to the website is coming from a decided;y old-fashioned media--newspapers (albeit of the online variety). More than 20% of Hulu's traffic came from newspaper Web sites. The largest age demographic for visitors to print news Web sites is older Internet users over the age of 55.
So, it seems, the so-called Greatest Generation may be leading us to the true convergence of television and computer--not the web-savvy 18-24 year olds, and marketed through the power of traditional media players.
