Commentary

Real Media Riffs - Friday, Jun 10, 2005

  • by June 10, 2005
WHAT MEDIA PROFESSIONALS NEED TO BE THINKING ABOUT NOW. WANT TO KNOW THE ANSWERS? - As the 2005-06 upfront marketplace winds down - the broadcast prime-time one, anyway - is anyone wondering how different next year's will be? We are. No, we don't mean whether it will be a buyer's or a seller's market. Chances are, it will be another seller's marketplace. What we mean is how different the media landscape will be a year from now when advertisers, planners and buyers consider making their annual fiscal media decisions. We're not the only ones. The folks at the Radio and Television Research Council have also begun thinking about life after 2005-06, and more specifically, how prepared the media industry is for the sudden changes being wrought by the advance of so many new media technologies. And not just the ones that consumers are using, but also the ones Madison Avenue uses to base its negotiations off of.

The advent of ratings for digital video recorders, portable people meters, local people meters, Project Apollo, new RFID measurement technologies, Nielsen's new A/P meters all promise to fundamentally alter the way media time is valued and negotiated. At least that's been the theory. If you happen to find yourself in Midtown Manhattan around lunchtime on Monday and you want to hear what some experts think the outcome will be, you might want to show up at the RTRC's luncheon at the Yale Club. And it's not just for the rubber chicken, but for the game of chicken the new research currencies may cause buyers and sellers to play.

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And who better to provide those insights than the RTRC's panel: TNS' Jon Swallen, National Cinemedia's Doug Pulick, iVillage's Barry Kresch, and of course, Erwin Ephron. But as smart as this assemblage may be, truth be told, they may have more questions than answers. Just consider the panel's theme: "The Knowledge Gap: What Media Research Professionals Need to be Thinking About Now (But May Not Be)."

Not that there's any gap in knowledge among these speakers, but the subject matter they'll be tackling is far less certain.

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