• by April 15, 2004

WE'RE JUST RIFFING, BUT WHAT ARE THESE GUYS WHIFFING? -- Inflation. It can be an ugly word in the best of times, but coming at a time when U.S. marketers are trying to hold the line on media prices, it's got to be downright demoralizing. But that's just the word that's being used both on and off Madison Avenue. In as many days, two significant TV players have already telegraphed plans to reap double-digit CPM gains in this year's upfront ad negotiations. No surprise there - telegraphing, we mean. But coming from these particular players - an ascendant CBS and a uniquely positioned Scripps Networks group - we have to take this early sales positioning seriously. The so-called eye network has every right to be putting itself back in the Tiffany network bracket. CBS has historically performed at a relative CPM gap compared to the other major broadcast networks, something Viacom prez Mel Karmazin and his sales team have been all too aware of and have worked diligently to correct. It's just too bad that CBS' right to do so happens to have coincided with some of the weakest advertising marketplaces in recent years.

Despite that, the CBS sales team has managed to inch closer to CPM parity, even as the ABC, NBC and Fox have continue to boost their underlying ad costs. Now, CBS says the 2004-05 season is its time to get even. And it makes a compelling claim that it will indeed overtake NBC as prime-time's alpha network, and the one that, with the exception of some demos, likely will control a supply of the most dominant inventory. The big wild cards will be whether NBC melts down completely now that it's losing lynchpin series like "Friends" and "Frasier" and whether ABC can muster the kind of prime-time development to put itself back in serious running. The situation for Fox is not nearly so dire, especially given the awesome success of "American Idol."

Amid the shifting broadcast turf, Scripps chief Ken Lowe has come out with a compelling argument for a "healthy double-digit increase" in his networks' CPMs. Going a step further and grabbing a mantle previously owned by Discovery Networks, Lowe went on to predict a sizeable ad volume shift -- $750 million to $1.3 billion -- from broadcast to cable overall. And the thing is, that is a very feasible scenario given what marketers and media buyers are signaling about their upfront ad plans for this year. The only difference, of course, would be the ad folks expectations for CPM inflation.

These issues will be addressed later today during the Television Bureau of Advertising's annual marketing conference and tomorrow morning at MEDIA magazine's "Outfront" conference, both of which are being held in New York, and which feature top media buyers and network, cable and syndication sales executives. The discussions are part of the early public spin that takes place in any upfront sales cycle, and the big trick will be sifting between the buyer and seller market rhetoric to get to something that approximates truth. Actually, a panel discussion slated for Friday's MEDIA magazine forum - "A Whistleblower's Guide To The Upfront" - promises to do just that: tell the truth, in fact, many of the deepest and most darkest secrets of the games people really play during upfront ad negotiations. It's going to be delivered by some former big buyers and sales guys who theoretically have no axes to grind. We'll see.

Meanwhile, the most irksome truth of all to materialize as the upfront rhetoric begins to build is that consumer price inflation also is starting to rear its ugly little head. Consumer prices jumped 0.5 percent in March, much more than the experts had been anticipating, and enough to bring the annual consumer inflation rate up to 6.0 percent. During 2003, consumer prices rose only 1.9 percent. While there is no written economic law stating that there is a correlation between consumer prices and advertising trade costs, the development provides one more argument for media price inflation at a time when media buyers have been signaling "flat to moderate" or even, dare we say, "rollbacks" in their CPM plans.

USING THE KEY OF IMAGINATION TO UNLOCK SOME UPFRONT DOORS -- The Riff found itself traveling through another dimension Wednesday night at the Manhattan Center in New York. It was a dimension of not only sight and sound but of mind, plus a fair amount of sales spin. It was a wondrous pitch whose boundaries were that of the imagination, and in case you haven't gotten it by now, that's a signpost up ahead and your next stop is the BET upfront sales zone.

There were many reasons for BET to invoke a "Twilight Zone" theme in its upfront sales presentation. The show was shot in, well, black and white. It's one of the vintage jewels of BET parent Viacom. And most importantly of all, the program always focused on the kind of alternate realities that BET sales chief Louis Carr said continues to plague a network that delivers an audience that is still invisible to some on Madison Avenue. BET made that point using a series of vignettes depicting media buyers in highly stereotypical situations and politically incorrect views on African American consumers.

"For the 18 years I've worked for BET, we've tried to tell our story using more conventional approaches and, frankly, it hasn't worked," said Carr. "This time, we delivered some of our own 'shock and awe' through our 'Twilight Zone' theme to dispel misconceptions." Okay, we just hope that Carr had already secured the licensing rights from Viacom chief Mel Karmazin before dispelling it.