Being Upfront About The Upfront.

Yes, kids, it’s that time of year again. When the dogwoods are in full bloom, the city streets begin to throw off their old scents, and the casual rollerblader and cyclist can be found in great numbers along the Hudson.

These are all signs that once again the television upfront is nearly upon us.

Like the mating dance of the blue-footed boobies, advertisers and broadcasters are raising their feet one at a time and then swiveling their heads away from their prospective mates and looking to the skies as if they aren’t interested in one another.

The advertisers, for their part, play the tough guy, puffing out their chests insisting THIS is the year they end the madness and refuse to pay higher rates.

“Considering threats from the Internet, video-on-demand, TiVo and other entertainment choices, instead of a price increase, there should be a price cut,” Jeff Linder/Exec VP-creative director/Della Femina Rothschild Jeary was quoted as saying in the April 26th issue of Advertising Age.

An article that ran May 3rd, also in Ad Age, had Steven Wilhite, vice president of marketing at Nissan North America, saying that he plans to spend less in the upfront this year and instead, expects to allocate more dollars to other media such as cable TV, outdoor, online, and events.

The networks, for their part, play coy, saying that they are really a service industry and are there to work with advertisers, trying to give them what they want and make the process as painless as possible. They claim to be interested in what the agencies and their clients have to say and open to making things better for them.

But this is the same dance that takes place every year and has become the stuff from which columns in trade mags and newsletters are made for a month or so prior to when the actual mating occurs.

To date, what this union of boobies has yielded are 4 facts:

1. Rates go up every year. 2. Advertisers pay these higher rates every year. 3. Audiences of network broadcast vehicles shrink every year. 4. Complaining about it hasn’t shrunk budgets or lowered costs.

In the recent past, the online media industry has looked with dissatisfaction upon the upfront process-and national broadcast media in general-as an opportunity to scurry on out there and get a piece of the action. And it should, as a wider distribution of the genetic package leads to greater bio-diversity in the media kingdom and, ultimately, stronger life forms.

Do we have any reason to believe that the mating ritual will turn out any other way between these two birds, the broadcast networks, and the advertisers? Should the online advertising industry hold out hope once more that major general market advertisers, fed up with the ongoing tulip bulb frenzy of upfront buying, will move to its media?

There is some hope that we may see this in the coming years; we may even see a little this year. The auto manufacturers may just be posturing, but more than any other category, as of late, the category offers proof that a portion of its goals can be met using online media.

According to the most recent cross-media optimization study released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 6 percent of all sales from Ford Motor Co.’s F-150 pickup truck advertising campaign were directly attributable to online marketing. That is not insignificant. According to Ford’s marketing communications manager, Rich Stoddart, the return on investment for each dollar spent online during the campaign was more than double the return-on-investment of any offline media. This, too, is no small affair.

Let face it, though, for the most part, advertisers will continue to do what they have always done because it is what they have always done. American marketers are more risk-averse than just about any other marketer in the world-and it shows. (The dank and unseemly Subservient Chicken campaign notwithstanding). “In spite of the fact that for every “Apprentice” there are ten “Couplings,” marketers will continue to go with what they know, letting the methods and philosophies of marketing change with every retirement party, rather than through active evangelism.”

For now, however, advertisers and broadcast networks will continue to show each other the bottoms of their webbed feet and feign disinterest in each other only to end up laying the same eggs.

By Jim Meskauskas
Courtesy of http://www.MediaPost.com