Studies Prove Love & Hip Hop Boosts Numbers of Blacks Watching TV

Monday, June 9, 2014

by Erica Lamar

Studies conducted within the last year have shown that African-Americans are not only the biggest consumers of products that are being pushed by large corporations using clever marketing tactics during the primetime hour, but we are the group of people that is watching the most television than any other in the country. Why, then, do these corporate entities ignore these findings, and continue to promote negativity through its advertisements, and within the rich contextual framework of baby mama drama, the same old stories of one man juggling two and three women, and the downward-spiraling image of the African-American woman on the silver screen?

According to studies published by Nielsen, entitled Resilient, Receptive and Relevant, black Americans hold a lot of weight with regard to “audience and purchasing power.” As of late, we have grown to amass a buying power of $1 trillion, and this number is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion by 2017. However, ad executives have not acknowledged these figures, and are bunching African-Americans into the entire viewing audience instead of targeting blacks as a specific demographic with individualized and unique wants and needs. Also, according to this study, “While the Afircan-American household earns less than market average, their annual retail spending accounts for 87 percent of total market retail spending—and they tend to shop more.” This, perhaps, is why some of our programming has criticized as being lazily put together and running on pessimism —because advertisers know that we will be tuned in, and we will purchase the products that are being marketed during commercial breaks, whether they are geared toward our audience, or not.

“Right now, network stations don’t tend to feature black casts, and cable channels focus heavily on reality series like the Real Housewives of Atlanta, Real Husbands of Hollywood, and Love & Hip-Hop.

If African-Americans are the majority audience and prefer diversity, studio executives could expand casting directives to be more inclusive of people of color across all types of programming.

That, however, doesn’t seem to be the case.

Look at the current line-up of fall comedies on major networks – not one primetime sitcom centers on a black family.”

In another case study, researchers found that the largest African-American television markets in the U.S. were found in New York and Atlanta. That is funny, seeing as though those are the grounds for the current “Love and Hip Hop”franchises. Being that this is the case, we should begin to at least be aware that programs like these are more than a guilty pleasure—they are basically what sway advertisers toward what they are going to bring out within the years to come. They are aware of what we like to eat, drink, wear, how we like to InstaFlex and Tweet (as the study notes that African-Americans are 44 percent more likely than others to create a social media profile), and who we date..or not. Perhaps we should push these executives toward a higher standard of programming through our actions.