[opendtv] twilight of the dinosaurs
- From: DISMO@xxxxxxx
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- Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 03:30:59 EDT
Glitzy 'Upfront' Week Masks
Changing Television Business
By RICHARD TURNER
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 13, 2005 2:45 p.m.
The old-line broadcast networks and their advertisers will gather in New York
next week to party like it's 1977.
Those were the days when the networks really did dominate popular culture
--when "Roots" was on the air and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was taking a
victory lap. Those days, of course, are long gone. But rituals persist. And the
annual "upfront" is an especially creaky ritual that allows the networks and
their
advertisers to pretend, for a moment, that the last quarter century never
happened.
This anachronistic extravaganza actually works and is at least partly
responsible for why the fortunes of the traditional networks aren't falling
even
faster. Television people know how to put on a show, and starting Monday at
places
like Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall, they'll wine and dine and
bedazzle ad buyers from all over, who show up every year. However hard-nosed,
many
will go home with enough residual goodwill to not send all of their money to
the Internet or cable just yet.
There will be much high-fiving about this past year's bright spots --
"Desperate Housewives," "American Idol," the continued strength of the "CSI"
franchise. Next season's new shows will be unveiled with fanfare.
Truth is, it's been another mediocre year. No hit sitcoms yet again, flat ad
revenue expected, flat ratings despite ABC's resurrection, the CBS News
scandal. The familiar host of enemies still closes in -- mounting competition
for ad
dollars, new technologies and an audience that has been shrinking for 30
years. Any notion of a Big Three of ABC, CBS and NBC -- or Four with Fox -- is
as
mystifying to a kid as a rotary phone.
Perhaps the grimmest symbol is that "Monday Night Football" will defect to
cable next year. The networks' argument used to be that only they had the deep
pockets and expertise to produce truly top-shelf programming. But "MNF," the
most expensive regular show on television, went to ESPN, which gets revenue
from
subscribers as well as from advertisers (and possesses an agnostic owner,
Disney, which owns cable and broadcast both so doesn't much care).
Nevertheless, the upfront seems frozen in amber. Its message: We are still
the world's best entertainers selling the greatest advertising mass-market
vehicle ever known to man. The presentations are slick, the stars on display,
the
tables groaning with shrimp fresh and plump. Research whizzes produce positive
ways to spin even the most pathetic ratings. Inside cracks are made about
rival-network executives so everyone feels they're in the club. Last year,
after
Chairman Les Moonves was finished talking about 18-49 demographics, CBS brought
out The Who for a few songs. The boomer-intensive crowd flipped.
The actual "upfront market" itself -- when ad deals really get done -- is a
tough negotiation that takes place over time and behind closed doors. And
advertisers are questioning the value of big-network buying more than ever. But
next week's festivities score valuable feel-good points.
All this opulence and razzle-dazzle tugs at the heartstrings of the
advertising people as much as it does the network executives. Their world has
changed,
too. The upfront also honors a vanishing business culture, when deals were
made with clients on the golf course or over a steak dinner -- not with the
cool,
meritocratic reason of digital data. The 30-second spot was the gold standard
of advertising, not a multi-platform media-buying campaign crunched by the
numbers.
Common wisdom has it that the reason the old-line TV networks aren't toast by
now is that as media options fragment, advertisers will crave the biggest
audience more than ever, even as it shrivels. One can take or leave that
argument. But the way the networks hang in there also has something to do with
The Who
and the shrimp.
Richard Turner has been covering the television business off and on since
1983.
Write to Richard Turner at richard.turner@xxxxxxxx
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111600860197733118,00.html
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