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Would it be so bad if 10 Bold & 10 Peach were gender skewing?

The legal stoush over Boss branding raises questions about target audiences.

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I may be alone in asking this, but would it be so bad if 10 Bold & 10 Peach were gender skewing?

It’s a question I raise given a media article today suggests 10 has contradicted itself over whether the multichannel rebrand was gender-skewed channels or demographic-skewing.

The stoush with (former) Fairfax Media-owned AFR Boss magazine has thrown light on it all.
An Age article claims a high-level Network 10 executive claimed a relaunched multichannel was “male-skewed” last year.

10’s general counsel Stuart Thomas told Fairfax senior legal counsel Linda Gough the channel was a “sports orientated programming, predominantly male skewed and generally light entertainment” that would not have a focus on business content.

This apparently contradicts 10’s chief content officer Beverley McGarvey said 10 Peach would target 16-to-39-year-olds while 10 Boss was aimed at “women and men over 40”.

In the end 10 Boss was renamed as 10 Bold.

Yes it’s a problem if top-level TV folk are contradicting one another. Yes it’s a problem if you name a channel Boss and it is male skewing (it implies females are not bosses too).

But as the annual Multichannel Survey reminds us, there are already channels that are gender skewing without the sky falling in.

7Mate caters for “all male viewers” with live sport, comedy, animation, movies, and real life factual programs. 9Life targets Women 18-54 with lifestyle and reality television content.

If 10 want male and female-skewing channels the market will soon tell them if there is room. Surely a bigger question is when will they get a third multichannel? That’s impacting on shares.

Right now 10 Bold seems to be doing quite well regardless of its name. It’s the main channel that is the big concern. And the better story.

24 Responses

  2. I tend to agree this time with the Network head honchos. 10Peach even though its a lame name/ brand for a channel is skewed to younger audiences yes the content is mostly female skewed too but the demographic for it is younger. 10Bold is skewing older no doubt about that. The only thing i dont quite understand is why the A-League is not on 10 now that ONE is Bold and skewing generally older. I guess it has to do with the 2 year tv deal that was struck before when previous ownership was running TEN. Overall i think 10s challenge is more about content and how to schedule it.

  3. Demographic and gender-skewing aren’t even contradictory. A demographic is just any subset of the population and can be based on age, sex, income, geographic distribution etc. The fact that more males than females watch NCIS repeats on 12 isn’t exactly significant. It only matters to rival media organisations trying to trash Ten’s brand using bogus arguments based on intersectionality.

  4. When scrolling down the EPG to see what’s on surely, like us, one selects the program, not at all interested in which channel it’s on. This whole Bold, Peach, Gem, Go, mate etc. thing is nonsense.

    1. Yes, exactly right. I scroll through all the channels looking for shows that may interest me. Don’t give a stuff which channel it’s on or what the name is. Be a bit silly to not watch a show you like because you don’t like the stupid channel name.

    2. Agreed. Which is why I often find myself watching against the demographic. 7mate is a favourite channel. I don’t really care about the gender (or age) branding except for the stereotypes that are implied by the content choices. A clear example is the nauseating 9Honey segments that assault the viewer after a good show (like Barnwood Builders) where airhead women discuss inane “issues” that are supposedly important to women. I can’t turn it off quickly enough. No wonder our young men and women struggle for good role models.

  5. ONE was so good…strong …said it all…good logo…could have just added 10/ to either end..now there is more chatter (with giggling) than actual attention to content on both of these channels…Peach is a real turn off for me.

  6. I made a comment on a SMH article about the 10 BOSS branding last night, saying how petty I thought it was for Nine to pursue this when no-one would ever confuse a TV channel with a financial rag. They didn’t publish it (nor anyone else’s comments for that matter) before eventually closing the comments altogether. I’d have loved to have seen what people said. Perhaps they all felt the same way as me. Nine really is the BOSS now I guess.

  7. I thought One HD, then One had the most distinctive station identification and voice-overs of any station, but that is just the opinion of an untrained viewer.

  10. when the ten hit restart last year it was pretty obvious that boss/bold was aimed at the male viewers where as peach was aimed at female viewers, I don’t see any issue with that at all. you’re picking a target audience and trying to build a channel that audience will watch.

    The networks use to target kids in the afternoons (3pm to 6pm) because they knew they’d be at home. there’s nothing wrong with creating a channel for men or women,

    Foxtel launched FX later calling it W before relaunching FX as a channel with shows more aimed at the male viewer.

  11. I fail to see how ELEVEN/10 Peach has ever been successful with either female or 16-39 viewers due to the bizarre decision to overwhelm the schedule with endless reruns of the same dated sitcoms ad infinitum (do kids still watch Happy Days, Becker, and Frasier?), especially Raymond and Sex and the City. With the FOX contract gone, TEN have lost most of their best younger-skewing shows. Where are all the younger-skewing The CW (CBS) shows? Perhaps the rights have expired or they only negotiated a one-time deal, but it surprised me that The O.C. was never aired again on TEN. They could be playing it daily alongside the other teen soaps of old (most episodes are PG anyway, and it wouldn’t take much to edit the M rated episodes). And why aren’t they playing Riverdale? Where are the 80s/90s episodes of Neighbours? (as a complementary side dish to contextualise the current episodes)

    2. Pretty much every CW show is already sold elsewhere. It’d be a mistake to continue selling them elsewhere, or at least the CBS Productions for CW.

    3. All the good CW shows are distributed by Warner Bros and are elsewhere because the target audience watches very little live TV these days. All secondary channels are full of repeats, and 10 and 11 are successful because they are full of CBS shows that CBS/Ten pays CBS whatever for. Just about all of the commercial networks revenue comes from a handful of shows on the main channel and sport so who cares?

  12. I have no issue with gender-skewed channels, and this is what 10 seem to have done which is fine. The name Boss was terrible, Bold is an improvement. 10 Peach on the other hand is a terrible name, and shall remain as 11\Eleven for me when I refer to it. The biggest problem though is content. So far I have not watched anything on Bold, there has been nothing of interest. Like @Johnny1p5 said, shows like Monk and Psych might pull me over to it, however they’d need to be shown unedited, and in single episodes where they are easy to find and follow complete seasons, not showing weeknights then occasionally on a weekend to fill a gap. For 11, reruns of Two and a Half Men is not going to save them. Last night they aired triple episodes, then two hours later repeated the second two of those three. Content speaks more than a name when it comes to television, and the 10 channels are failing to…

  13. With one less channel than the others I think age skewing is best for TEN, take in the USA where CBS run the CW Network with Warners, you have the Arrowverse shows plus Riversdale, Legacies, Charmed, Supernatural, Jane the Virgin and etc. Those appeal to both Male and Female 16-to-39 and are what Peach should be, yes licencing rights are likely getting in the way but over time I’m sure some of those other shows like Charmed, Supernatural and The Flash will join Peach.

    Like you say BOLD is doing well pretty much on the back of NCIS, so that demographic is tuning in, if they still have the rights to USA Network shows, then they could add in replays of say Monk, White Collar, Psych, Burn Notice and others to bolster it. While maybe picking up The Sinner, Suits, Covert Affairs, Royal Pains and etc, with The Purge and Mr Robot good picks for over on Peach.

  15. I am not even sure if gender skewing is the right description, but I agree the branding has negative implications.

    I am not a blokly bloke, but I do like sports, but have no interest in boating, fishing and camping shows. So, am I a Boss or a Peach? If I was to look at the full gamete of shows on both channels – then I would favour Peach. I can easily switch over to Boss for some shows, but not as a full-time viewing channel.

    The branding is just easy shorthand for viewers to (think they) know what they will get. However looking at young females today, you would collectively put them in the Peach barrel at your peril. Likewise to put all males into a category of beer drinking boofhead bogans is equally perilous.

    What are two short catchy words for cerebral or mindless? Maybe that would work better!

    1. I’m with Neil, I can watch shows that are both on Peach and Boss. There was no real need for a big branding change, just new content please. We’re up to about the 10th run of Star Trek The Next Generation, how about playing Deep Space Nine or Enterprise.
      Just change it up, please give us something different

  16. Gender skewing is ok in itself, it’s the business of selling advertising and attracting ratings, although it is of course immediately limiting, or in the case of 7 Mate, a name that’s tiresomely provincial (but it does offer what you expect it might). The problem with these two were the names – in relation to each other – which positioned one channel as male and called it “Boss” (masculine, stoic, in charge) and the female-skewed entertainment is the “Peach” (whatever that might mean – the little pleasing thing? the pretty thing?). It’s hard to see how this could not be a problem. Now that Boss is gone and Bold is in this duality is slightly better although both are still crap names. As commercial TV in Australia seems desperate in it’s race for the bottom of the barrel I’m surprised they just didn’t go for 10 Blokes and 10 Sheilas and be done with it. It would at least would…

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