Upfront Questionable, Expected to Slip from Last Year’s $24.5B

Advertisers may well be in the catbird seat this upfront; the outlook is gloomy for broadcasters, with forecasts predicting the overall upfront will be flat to down from last year’s $24.5 billion (across broadcast, cable and syndicated TV).

Several months ago, broadcasters were expecting a brisk upfront, as tight inventory had been causing scatter prices to soar as high as 40 percent more than last year’s upfront prices. But a weakening economy, tied with plummeting ratings, is causing demand to drop, writes Media Life. The scatter market has weakened, indicating the upfront market may be a slow one - though it is expected to be better for cable.

Now, Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen is expecting spending to be up 1 percent at best. At worst, she says, spending could be down by as much as 8 percent. So far, say media buyers, negotiations have barely begun, and probably won’t for a week or more.

In the just-completed television season, prime time ratings for network TV slipped 9 percent from the previous season. Perhaps more disheartening for the broadcast networks is that ratings didn’t bounce back to pre-strike levels after they began airing original episodes when the writers strike ended: pre-strike ratings in the 18-49 demo were 15.4, slipping to 13.9 during the strike and 13 after the strike ended, according to the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau.

Brad Adgate, senior vp and corporate research director at Horizon Media, says there’s no reason to believe ratings will bounce back in the fall.

And as dollars have shifted from broadcast TV to cable, the urgency with which the upfronts were once conducted is all but gone. Though the broadcast nets still have limited inventory, cable - which is seeing ratings rise - has plenty of it. Buyers don’t need to feel as rushed to snap up the ratings points they need on broadcast when they can pick and choose among cable nets.