Success Quote by Les Brown

Television’s real product isn’t entertainment; it’s you. Les Brown’s line has the blunt clarity of someone trained to follow the money, not the storyline. By framing TV as “day-to-day commerce,” he strips away the romance of culture-making and reclassifies the medium as a logistics operation: programming is just packaging, and attention is inventory.

The phrasing is deliberately transactional. “Delivering audiences to advertisers” turns viewers into a shipment, a unit moved from living room to market with minimal friction. That’s the subtext: TV’s supposed mission - informing, connecting, delighting - is structurally secondary to a business model that rewards retention over truth, sensation over nuance, familiarity over risk. The cleanest detail is the bait metaphor. Bait doesn’t have to be nourishing, or even especially good; it has to be sticky. It has to hook. That’s a compact explanation for why formats recur, why conflict gets amplified, why news bleeds into spectacle. The point isn’t that creators are cynical individuals; it’s that the system pays for a certain kind of emotional capture.

Context matters. Brown comes out of a late-20th-century world where broadcast TV was the mass medium, advertising was the primary revenue stream, and ratings were the scoreboard. His critique anticipates today’s “free” platforms too: whether the metric is Nielsen points or watch time, the underlying trade remains attention exchanged for targeted persuasion. The sting of the quote is its reversal of dignity: the show isn’t the commodity; the viewer is.