Broadcasting: What Ad Slump?

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Six months ago, the state of the TV networks seemed grim. For the first time during a regular television season, cable's basic channels had collectively passed the six broadcast networks in their share of the prime-time audience. Ad spending--down for all media since the start of the recession--seemed unlikely to do much to improve the picture. Some industry analysts were predicting that when the so-called up-front market began--the period in May and June when major advertisers reserve the bulk of their commercial time for the upcoming TV season--the networks would be lucky to match the dismal results of 2001, when revenues fell a hefty 12.5% from the year before. All this seemed to bolster the doomsayers who have long predicted that network TV is an endangered species.

But a funny thing happened to the networks on the road to ruin. Although the American economy is still struggling to emerge from the recession, advertisers have started throwing money at the national broadcasters. Gobs of it.

When last spring's up-front market closed, the six networks had accepted a record $8.2 billion in commitments for advertising time in the upcoming season, up substantially from the previous year's depressed $7 billion total. Even better, cancellation rates over the summer for those orders were only about 5%, a big improvement over the nerve-jangling 10% to 15% rates last year. Comparably low cancellation rates are starting to register for the first quarter of 2003. All this has left relatively little ad time available in the so-called scatter market, where advertisers who prefer to buy time at the last minute come to shop. The scarcity, combined with surprisingly strong demand, has sent prices soaring.

"We got premiums of between 25% and 40% in scatter" above the prices fetched last spring, says Joseph Abruzzese, the former president of sales for Viacom's CBS Television, who just left to take over ad sales at cable's Discovery Networks, a unit of Discovery Communications. And that was after CBS leveraged last season's muscular prime-time performance into 10% to 12% up-front rate increases, especially for such younger-skewing hits as Survivor, Everybody Loves Raymond and CSI.

Network TV is outperforming most other media. Up-front sales for cable TV were up about 14% from last year, but revenues for the first six months of the year were off 10%, according to Competitive Media Reporting. Ad revenues of local newspapers climbed 6% in the same period, but those of national newspapers were down 6%. Magazine ad pages ticked up 2.6% in September, according to the Publishers Information Bureau, but ad-page totals are still down almost 7% for the first nine months of the year. Radio revenues, says the Radio Advertising Bureau, have shown a 3% gain so far this year, after suffering a 7.5% decline last year.