• Bloomberg, Wednesday, July 15, 2009 9:45 AM

U.S. TV broadcasters are turning to pawn shops, plastic surgeons, mortgage brokers, landscapers and other nontraditional sources to replace a 20% drop in auto ads. Auto ad revenue at local stations plunged 52% in the first quarter of 2009.

Local station owners, such as Nexstar Broadcasting Group and Gray Television, are selling small local businesses on the notion that TV is now affordable. "We're out just beating bushes that we should have been doing a long time ago," says Robert Prather, president of Gray Television. Indeed, the price of an average 30-second local TV spot dropped as much as 20% from 2007 to 2008, per the Television Bureau of Advertising.

But the new ad sources aren't likely to entirely replace the decline in auto revenue, analysts and TV executives agree. "The big issue is that it takes 10 or 12 small advertisers to make up for some of the big car dealers we've had in the past," says Prather.

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