Businesses spend countless hours trying to figure out what their customers want. They conduct surveys and host focus groups to find out what their customers want. So when a company knows exactly what customers want, it would be logical for them to do something about it. Unless, of course, they aren’t paying attention.
Viacom is a great example of a company that isn’t paying too much attention right now. They have three or four dozen incredibly hot children’s television shows that ran on the Nickelodeon network from the late 80’s through the mid 90’s that were utterly fantastic and are in high demand among twenty-somethings.
Yes, you heard right. Twenty-somethings like me are interested in children’s shows. We grew up shows like Noozles, Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Secret World of Alex Mack. Our quarterlife crises are making us nostalgic for our favorite childhood programming, and we’re pretty damn vocal about it.
For example, there is a 38,648 member group on Facebook dedicated solely to pestering Viacom to make these shows available to us in some form. There are countless online petitions, organized e-mailing, letter-writing and phone banking campaigns. People in their twenties are practically screaming for these great televisions shows to be resurrected from the Viacom vaults. We’re expressing this demand in our online communities.
We represent a target market with a lot of disposable income. We buy DVDs, and we also buy stuff we see advertised alongside content we consume. With all the competition for our eyeballs, you would think that a company that is sitting on these hot media properties would be eager to re-monetize them.
Unless, of course, they’re not paying attention.
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