TV Upfront
These are the stories that are conveniently forgotten when pundits say that “online is taking away from the budgets of TV”:
“CW, jointly owned by CBS and Time Warner, expects to secure $640 million to $650 million in ad deals, according to a person familiar with the situation. That is compared to the $625 million to $640 million the young network secured the year earlier. CW expects price increases in the low double-digits, according to this person.”
Overall it looks like the TV upfront is up low single digits in dollar terms. That doesn’t take into account the trend of more spot spending. And this in an environment of measurement mess where advertisers know their ads aren’t being watched (by virtue of the commercial ratings vs tv show ratings) and rising DVR usage.
All of that and the CPMs on a channel like CW were up by double digits. Anyone in online advertising should simply accept this inevitability. Online dollars are growing because of direct-response justification and the big branding dollars are not shifting (they may be growing in parallel) but the word shifting is just categorically wrong at this point in time. Maybe ten years down the track, but not in 2007 and not since the Internet’s inception.
