Even as we look to produce content for young adults, are we nurturing, and bringing front & centre, a talent pool of young writers who are equipped to feed this segment?
With streamers competing for markets and audience targeting becoming more specific by the day, the debate around young adult viewers is heating up. What makes this highly intelligent, perceptive, discerning, and ‘open-to-all ideas’ segment of the audience tick? What do they want to watch? Do young adults have definitive content preferences? Or are they shape-shifting dunes in a desert? And importantly, who are young adults?
Defining the young adult segment
Senior executives and film producers, during an international seminar held earlier this year, defined Young Adults as the term used for viewers from the age of 15 until the time they form a family nucleus. Attest, on the other hand, defines young adults, or Generation Z as it calls them, as the category of content consumers in the age bracket of 18-24 years.
To club them all in one category would of course be inaccurate. It speaks highly of a societal shift that there is now a new generation of young adults every 3 or 4 years.
The challenge
For writers, the key to success lies in knowing their audience, and speaking a language that young adults identify with. And herein lies the challenge. Given the stakes in a high risk business, a producer would naturally veer towards the works of established writers. Do younger writers, with an intuitive understanding of their audience, equipped with the requisite craft and skillsets, have ease of access to production houses and streaming platforms? Would they, themselves seeking to carve their own identities, be given their due credit as writers of a potentially brilliant story that resonates with a segment that they are or were a part of until recently?
A worthwhile investment
Young adults have greater engagement with content than older adults. They are trying to figure out what to do for the rest of their lives. As they learn ‘adulting’, build careers, form relationships, and seek to establish their own identity, viewing content becomes a vital part of their exercise of self-discovery.
Their media consumption is thus more exploratory, reinforcing the importance of good writing that they identify with. Perhaps no segment, more than this one, drives home the fact that it is the target audience, and not the writer, that determines the success of a show.
On the average, young adults watch content for longer hours than older adults.
Generally as an audience base, and notwithstanding their fragmented audience choices, they have greater longevity and value, making them a worthwhile investment both from a creative and commercial perspective.
Global stats (58% in USA and 48.7% in the UK) indicate that this is the segment most likely to pay for content. The Indian subcontinent can’t be too far behind.
That there is a market waiting to be addressed is not in doubt. That this audience is unpredictable is equally without doubt. But given the young demographic profile of India and South Asia, does this make for an exciting market opportunity that is worth investing in, both in terms of young writers and content creation? Hell, yes.