Maybe Younger Isn't Better   

CBS tries to attract aging baby boomers.

Every eight seconds a baby boomer turns 50. Bill Clinton, Dolly Parton..and millions of those born during the prosperity of the late 1940s are passing the sacred half-century mark.

The demographic "pig in the python" is graying, and television executives are trying to figure out how to react. CBS is hoping to lead the way by positioning itself as the network of choice for boomers.

CBS' "Murphy Brown" will continue next year for a 10th season even though this current one was long rumored to be its last. The fiftysomething Candice Bergen and gang remain crucial on Monday nights if CBS hopes to retain the over-50 crowd.

Madison Avenue will be paying close attention to CBS' efforts. Demographers have long warned that the baby boom has changed everything it has touched, but for as long as network TV has been with us, its advertising credo has stated: Seek out only 18-49 year olds; avoid those over 50! The theory has been that after age 50 people become too set in their ways.

CBS is defying this conventional wisdom, hoping that advertisers will beat a path to its Sixth Avenue headquarters. In a grand experiment, CBS is abandoning "younger is better" and betting that the baby boomers will respond to advertising in ways their parents never did.

The CBS strategy is to embrace the past. Former "Dallas" star Larry Hagman is back on a new prime time show, as are longtime CBS stalwarts Bea Arthur, Andy Griffith and Dick Van Dyke. Bill Cosby, NBC's mainstay of the 1980s, anchors CBS on Monday nights. An hour later comes "Cybill," starring baby boomer Cybill Shepard. Bryant Gumbel, born in 1948, has come over from NBC. And for the May 1997 sweeps, the graying cast of "Knots Landing" will reprise their roles in a mini-series.

CBS executives foresee a prime time audience embracing a safer, simpler world populated by their own. Mighty Coca-Cola agrees, and has already come onboard with $50 million in new advertising.

A generation ago, CBS set off the age of TV programming for the urban, hip, 18-35-year-old consumer, canceling long-popular shows and acknowledging the baby boom was growing up.

Through the 1960s CBS led the ratings with rural hits such as "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Petticoat Junction" that drew audiences who had grown up in the Great Depression and wanted stories on the tube to portray simpler times.

In 1970, CBS owner William Paley pulled the plug. CBS consultants told Paley that the baby boomers were redefining marketing practices. Off went "Hee Haw" and "Green Acres," and on came "All in the Family" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Rural was out; New York and Minneapolis were in. Older faces were replaced by Mary and "Meathead."

Now, 27 years later, CBS is again changing course, to one more associated with AARP than MTV. CBS Entertainment President Les Moonves told the Wall Street Journal: "The world is going to have to realize that demographics are changing. You can't play by the old rules anymore."

Unexpected hits such as "Touched by an Angel," which has already spawned a spin-off, "Promised Land," provide Moonves' examples. And he boasts that last year "60 Minutes," the ultimate in over-50 demographics, beat back a charge by an unabashedly hip "Dateline" and regained its status as the premiere newsmagazine on television.

But boomers are not the lone demographic group CBS is targeting. This past March it invested $100 million to acquire 22 percent of SportsLine USA, which offers Internet sports scores and video clips. Here the target is male viewers, both young and old.

ýBS can and will promote its various television sports offerings through SportsLine USA. Indeed, the quoted $100 million price tag will never take the form of an actual check, but will rather be paid through advertisements for SportsLine USA on CBS' TV network, owned and operated television stations, radio network, and owned and operated CBS radio stations.

In the near future, expect CBS to make a serious effort to reclaim a stake in broadcasting professional football. CBS brass have already allocated what they figure will be the necessary millions of dollars from projected cash flows generated by its recently acquired Nashville Network and Country Music Television cable networks.

ðndeed, through these recent acquisitions, history has come full circle. During the 1980s and '90s The Nashville Network has proven profitable with its niche older audience, in part generated by rerunning former CBS hits such as "Dallas."

With all these corporate maneuvers aimed at baby boomers, CBS hopes it will prove to Wall Street and its corporate shareholders that when Westinghouse bought the ailing broadcasting operation a year-and-a-half ago it was $5.4 billion well invested.