FALLON’S TONIGHT WILL LOSE VIEWERS, ANALYSTS PREDICT

Advertising analysts are expecting that Jimmy Fallon’s total audience will drop considerably below Jay Leno’s when the audience settles in to a regular level following sampling next week. In an interview with Advertising Age magazine, Billie Gold, the vice president/director of buying and programming research for media buyer firm Carat, said that she expects that Fallon will attract about the same numbers that David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel do now (2.8 million and 2.4 million respectively), about a million fewer than Leno. In other words, he’s not likely to draw more viewers than Conan O’Brien did when he was relieved of his duties on the Tonight show after seven months in 2009. However, the network is anticipating that Fallon will draw a substantially larger audience of younger viewers than O’Brien did. Fallon currently has 11 million Twitter followers, it noted, while Leno had just 649,000. And NBC intends to reach out to that audience, AdAge observed, quoting Horizon Media exec David Campanelli as saying, “Cross-platform and viral videos are a necessity for a show like that to succeed… [and] to reach a digital audience that isn’t watching on TV.” But the problem with all this digital maneuvering, the trade publication observed, is that it will likely alienate the older audience that was Leno’s most loyal base. Said Carat’s Gold: “We are expecting to lose GRPs [gross ratings points] and don’t know where they are going to go.”