By: Unknown
From: International Herald Tribune
By Stuart Elliott
American broadcast networks and Madison Avenue may want to adopt the Elton John song "Honky Cat" as the official theme for the 2008- 9 television season.
Why? A lyric that Elton John sings - "And oh, the change is gonna do me good" - encapsulates the attitude of many broadcasters and advertisers as they prepare for a different kind of upfront week, which begins Monday.
The term upfront refers to networks offering previews in the spring of the prime-time programs they intend to broadcast in the autumn. It also describes how the advertisers and their agencies decide to buy billions of dollars of commercial time before the autumn season.
Change is in the air because of the mess the 100-day writers' strike made of the 2007-8 TV season, which ends this month. The strike scrambled the networks' schedules, chased away millions of viewers and impeded the ability of advertisers to reach the audiences they wanted.
"The networks, and advertisers, realized that an upfront reflective of a business model born when there were three networks is unsustainable," said John Rash, senior vice president and director for media negotiations at Campbell Mithun, which is part of Interpublic Group. His reference was to the era when ABC, CBS and NBC were the sole choices for American viewers.
After the strike was settled in February, the broadcasters vowed to rethink how the coming upfront week would proceed. As a result, the strike "had a major silver lining," said Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer at GroupM, a division of WPP Group, which includes giant agencies like MediaCom and MindShare.
The upfront week had turned into "a dog and pony show," Scanzoni said, "missing the mark from what it was intended to be: speaking to advertisers and media agencies about what the networks' strategies will be for the next season."
"Plans were under way at the networks to make changes," he added, "but the writers' strike was the catalyst that forced the issue."
Some changes are substantive. For example, the networks are ordering far fewer pilots, the test episodes of new series that are expensive to produce. They also intend to broaden the presentations beyond what will be on TV, to include programming for new media like the Internet and mobile devices.
And the networks will expand their horizon from the usual nine- month season - running September through May, with most new series brought out en masse in the autumn - to a year-round perspective, known in industry parlance as a 52-week season.
The senior executives at media agencies who help marketers determine which shows to buy commercials in - and which to avoid - welcome the changes. They say they would like the revamped upfront week to become the new normal, rather than entering the record books with an asterisk (* temporary changes because of a strike-battered season).
"I'm hoping it's not just a one-year thing," said Chris Geraci, managing director for national broadcast investment at OMD, part of Omnicom Group, because "the whole process was due for some change."
Geraci embraced the idea of cutting back on pilots. "Instead of showing us clips of shows that may or may not look like that three months from now," he said, the networks "should make better use of the time" they have during the presentations.
One method of doing that would be, as the networks intend, to include in their presentations alternatives to television like broadband video and video on demand.
"We're into a world where it's not about TV, it's about video," said Charlie Rutman, chief executive for the North American operations of MPG, part of Havas, "which reflects consumer behavior."
That means the networks "are not in the TV business, they're in the video content business," he added, "and they have to find ways to monetize it."
Gail Ettinger, executive vice president at KSL Media, said: "The networks are selling in a 360-degree fashion because that's the way people live these days. They have to be better content providers because advertisers are looking for something better."
An end to "what we called the 'traditional upfront' " would make sense, Ettinger said, because "there's nothing about the media landscape that's traditional anymore."
The agency executives are also enthusiastic about the shift to the 52-week season, which was pioneered by Fox Broadcasting, part of News Corp., when it scheduled new series for summertime like "So You Think You Can Dance."
Executives at NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, even upped the ante last month when they outlined plans for a 65-week season, which would run from May 2008 through August 2009.
"The idea of dropping in new shows throughout the year is a smart move," said Kris Magel, senior vice president at Initiative, part of Interpublic, because "advertisers need original programming from June through August, not low-rated repeats."
The idea is also appealing, he added, because "lumping all the new shows into a big-noise launch in September," as the broadcasters have done for decades, is becoming increasingly problematic. Estimates of the failure rate for series that are introduced each autumn run as high as 90 percent.
"The upfront will be quite different than in the past if you don't have a defined programming schedule" that begins in September and ends in May, said Gene DeWitt, chairman at DeWitt Media.
He predicted that two networks would fare best in the brave new upfront world: Fox, because of successful series like "American Idol," and ABC, part of Walt Disney Co., because of a focus on "multiplatform offerings like the Internet, video on demand, DVDs and international."
After the upfront week presentations conclude Thursday, the negotiations between the networks and agencies begin in earnest. They can last from a week, if demand is strong, to four months, if demand is weak (there are separate negotiations for cable networks and syndicated shows as well as for broadcast programs outside prime time like newscasts).
In recent years, the amount of commercial time sold by the broadcasters in each upfront market has ranged from $8.5 billion to $9.5 billion; last year, the total was about $9.2 billion.
Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.
(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
