Soaps Vs. Simpson The Lure Of Television Trial Coverage Has Pulled Viewers Away From Daytime Soap Operas

One of the first things a visitor sees in the office of Pat Fili Krushel, president of ABC Daytime, is a model of a Bayer aspirin tablet the size of a dinner plate.

The big Bayer, on a shelf beneath photos of the casts of several ABC soap operas, is emblematic of the bitter pill soaps have had to swallow in recent years. These often-mocked daytime dramas once ruled the airwaves, but televised trials, at least 20 talk shows and dozens of specialized cable channels now contend for the same audience, leaving the soaps an increasingly smaller slice of the ratings pie.

The biggest single cause of the soaps’ recent woes has been the country’s addiction to the O.J. Simpson trial. In the first three months of 1995, at least a million fewer households tuned in to the passion and grief served up on ABC’s “All My Children,” and two CBS programs, “As the World Turns” and “The Young and the Restless,” compared with the same period a year ago.

But the ratings woes did not begin with that trial. An explosion of talk shows and the rise of Court TV took a hefty bite of the soaps’ audience in the last decade. In early 1981, a high point for soap operas, the highest-rated soap, ABC’s “General Hospital,” made a national spectacle of the courtship of Luke and Laura and had an 11.4 rating, according to the network’s research.

The top show today, CBS’s “The Young and the Restless,” receives only a 6.7 rating and is watched by about 1.4 million fewer viewers each week than the queen of talk, Oprah Winfrey. (Each rating point represents 954,000 homes.)

Because advertising rates are tied to ratings, this continued erosion has held down ad revenues for the networks and thinned the ranks of the soaps. In the last decade, seven soaps have been canceled by the big three networks, while only one - “The Bold and the Beautiful” on CBS has been added, bringing the total to 10, down from 18 in 1970.

“This is the last repertory theater in America,” said Felicia Minei Behr, executive producer of ABC’s “All My Children,” one of the longestrunning soaps. “If this goes we will lose not only a big franchise and a lot of money, but we’re going to lose a part of Americana.”

Despite the falloff in ratings, soap operas are still a multimillion-dollar business that pulled in an average of 15 percent of the networks’ income last year, according to industry estimates.

Last year nearly 50 million people tuned in each week, research shows, and the top four soap opera fan magazines have a combined circulation of more than 2 million.

While soaps are making less money than they did in the ‘70s, the shows still earn a hefty profit for networks, with advertisers paying an average of $20,000 to $25,000 for a 30-second spot during a soap.

A principal reason, ad executives say, is that soap operas cultivate a loyalty unrivaled in daytime programming, which is attractive for giant consumer-goods marketers like Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson.

“Advertisers that use daytime still think soap operas are a great place to advertise,” said Julie Friedlander, senior vice president of national broadcast negotiations at Ogilvy & Mather. “Women love their soaps. They watch them with great intensity.”

Created in the 1930s to sell detergent and other household products to women, soap operas have traditionally been the preeminent form for titillating episodic dramas, first on radio and then on television.

And though talk shows offer a competing diet of convoluted stories and impossible fates, most of these have not had the appeal of soaps among the demographic group most desirable to advertisers - women aged 18 to 49.

But that is changing. Between October and December of 1994, for example, the “Ricki Lake Show” and the “Jenny Jones Show” got higher ratings among that category of women than half the soap operas on the air.

And because the $200,000 typically required to produce a week’s worth of talk shows pales in comparison with the $1 million price tag for five episodes of a soap opera, the challenge posed by talk television is formidable.

Still, some marketers with large ad budgets for daytime television say the lurid content of many talk shows is not something they want associated with their products. “I stay away from those shows,” said William Kashimer, an associate media director at Colgate-Palmolive. “We don’t want to be near the skinheads beating people up.”

Last year, before the Simpson trial, soaps did surprisingly well. While declining to give actual figures, Krushel of ABC said there was a comparative “bull market” in ad revenue for soap operas last year, adding that the network’s daytime programming division had its most lucrative year since the early ‘80s.

Unfortunately, the money that daytime dramas used to pull in as profit must now go into sprucing up the shows with higher production quality.

Last summer, for example, the producers of “All My Children” spent about $500,000 to stage a tornado, fearing that anything short of a spectacular stunt would leave viewers bored.