I was ready for my closing argument. The information I gathered from leading trial attorneys for my past two pieces added so much additional weight to the premise that the 18-49 year old audience demo is finished, I was ready to end it right here. But I asked one too many questions.
Age=Influence … Very Often
In case you haven’t been following this series: a 34-year-old trial lawyer acquaintance of mine alerted me to the fact that litigators tend to correlate the age of a juror with his or her potential influence. Generally speaking, the older juror will be the more influential one. That’s who you want on your side. It’s the influencers who we want in our TV and dotcom audience as well. With that knowledge, 18-49 seems so arbitrary.
Voices of Experience
I called my friend Cindy Vreeland about this. She’s the Vice Chair of the Intellectual Property Litigation Practice Group at the top tier law firm WilmerHale. University of Chicago Law School class of 1990. “You’d love to persuade all members of the jury,” says Vreeland. But, in reality, you hope “to persuade the jurors who are interested in the case and have the power to persuade the others.”
And that means older people, right Cindy?