Diane Sawyer as an evening anchor: An opportunity for advertisers?

I can remember when Barbara Walters (then aged 47) was elevated from the “Today Show” to a role as co-anchor of the ABC Evening News. In 1976 that was very big news.

It’s a little surprising that Diane Sawyer (now 63) being named as sole anchor of the ABC Evening News is also big news, 23 years later. The announcement, like Walter Cronkite’s recent death, has given many commentators a chance to remind us that television network news doesn’t matter the way it used to. Maybe that’s a reason why television is finally comfortable turning it over to Vibrant Women over 50 – women like Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer.

I’d like to think it means that male television executives actually recognize that their audience truly accepts women in the role of network news anchor, a traditional position of authority in American culture.

Boomers will keep traditional media alive

Mainstream media companies like newspapers and television networks have spent many years wringing their hands over their failure to capture the same market share among 20-somethings that they have long held with Boomers. More recently, these companies have shifted that thinking, and realized that the Boomer wave can sustain them for many more years – and at least until another generation of executives has inherited the problem.

That ABC put a 63-year old woman at the helm of its signature news offering suggests it is embracing this philosophy, and appreciates the boost it may earn from Boomer women who enjoy seeing and listening to one of their own – especially one for whom they feel the trust and enjoyment that Sawyer has earned. At VibrantNation.com, our research and surveys confirm that Boomer women most important influencers are other “woman like them.”

What it means for advertisers

What Sawyer’s new job means about culture and news media is interesting, but what it may mean for advertisers is just as interesting, and less noted.

Pharmaceutical companies have long used the evening news to reach aging Americans. Other kinds of companies should follow, not just because evening news watchers skew older, and not just because the networks are betting on older viewers (which they are). Advertisers should connect with news programming like Sawyer’s because Sawyer’s presence makes the evening news more of a conversation between women, and nothing motivates Boomer women to try or buy new things more than conversations with others.

I believe that Sawyer’s very presence on the news, together with her programming decisions (which stories she runs, what spin she gives them), will make Vibrant Women more favorably inclined to advertisers on her show – especially if those advertisers recognize that they are probably more like Diane Sawyer (in mindset if not always in appearance) than the aging women in traditional pharma ads.

Of course I believe that social media remains the very best place for brands to engage Vibrant Women – or I wouldn’t have founded a website to reach them! But Diane Sawyer’s new job has suddenly made network television news a better choice than it was.