A day after network presidents predicted a quick and profitable upfront, media buyers don't disagree. This year has become a surprisingly robust market with early money flowing to the networks. Buyers contacted Thursday said the broadcasts were getting increases in the mid-teens for primetime, with The WB "closer to 20" and the rest of the bigger networks delivering increases of 13% to 14%. That's well above the revisionist predictions of increases of between 6%-7% and beyond even the optimism that had seized everyone before the war in Iraq and network executives afterward. The networks were, just as they predicted, reaping big benefits so far. "Right now, given the size of the dollars in the marketplace, it seems like they're all winners right now," said one buyer who declined to be identified. "We're very, very, very optimistic and we think by the end of this week and next it will be done," NBC Entertainment Chairman Jeff Zucker said Wednesday afternoon. Fox Entertainment Chairman Sandy Grushow said his network was seeing volume increases of upwards of 20% and one network president that the upfront could be finished by today. Kris Magel, SVP/group director at media-buying company Optimedia, confirmed that the broadcast upfront was going quickly and said it could be over by the end of the week. He also confirmed that cost increases were higher than anticipated and there had been more demand than had been anticipated, too. One rumor in the marketplace was that advertisers are overbuying, hedging their bets against getting burned in the scatter market later on. Magel said that no one had the complete answer. "The broadcast networks have been trying to figure that out, too," Magel said. Magel said the strong upfront market is good for some advertisers and not as good for others, with some able to get more efficient rates buying in the upfront than they would in the scatter market later on. He said that it's possible that if advertisers did over buy, there would be a lot of cancellations later on and that perhaps the scatter market will still go for a premium but not the extreme level that it had been earlier. "It's very hard to predict that right now," Magel said.
Starcom MediaVest Group will combine its entire Procter & Gamble brand planning into one group, it was announced yesterday. The group will be called SMG/P&G. It will be comprised of media directors and additional staff that currently handle P&G brand assignments. The group will be exclusive to P&G planning, according to a Starcom spokesperson and will be based in Chicago and York. In New York, the group will report into Laura Desmond, chief executive officer of MediaVest U.S.A., and will include team members from MediaVest and Saatchi & Saatchi. The Chicago team will report into Renetta McCann, chief executive officer of Starcom U.S.A. According to Starcom, the change was pursued to achieve "greater efficiencies across the multiple brand planning assignments within Publicis Groupe, and to create an organizational structure that more closely mirrors the category alignment within P&G. All of the brand and category assignments were previously handled by Publicis Groupe companies, and the shift represents a strategy jointly developed by holding company leadership." "After the Publicis Groupe acquisition of Bcom3 last fall, one of our first priorities was to marshal and align the media entities that focus on P&G, and we wanted to move forward in a way that is consistent with P&G's revolutionary category alignment," said Jack Klues, chief executive of Starcom MediaVest Group. "Aligning teams so that they can be entirely devoted to brand categories achieves an internal optimization of talent and resources for us. We gain greater efficiencies in managing the media assignments because we won't have staff in disparate locations simultaneously focused on the same category-specific challenges and opportunities." P&G management went on record in support of the change. A Starcom spokersperson said similar plans to form exclusive planning teams are not in the works for the agencies other brands including Coke and Kraft. Greg Ross, director of media for P&G North America, said: "Our point of contact with consumers is as strategically important as the content and messages we deliver to them. This realignment, made by Publicis, is consistent with our plans to move aggressively beyond traditional media thinking and embrace a holistic consumer communications platform. Creative and other media assignments are not impacted by this decision."
A day after being beat by a Chinese crew who broadcast live from the summit of Mount Everest, an American cable network's team has been delayed from mounting its challenge. It wasn't clear what had happened to delay the Outdoor Life Network's team and coverage of the ascent, which OLN had said had run into "unforeseen complications." The multimillion event, part of a six-month-long series called Global Extremes and sponsored by Toyota Motors USA, had been planned by the network for over a year. OLN had planned several hours of live coverage of its hand-picked American amateur climbers, beginning Thursday afternoon from the summit, the base camp at 17,000 feet and OLN's studios in Norwalk, Conn. Details were scarce but it seemed, at least from initial reports, that the climb to the summit had been delayed and not canceled. "We will provide updated programming information as soon as we have confirmation of date and time," OLN President/CEO Roger Williams said Thursday afternoon. In an interview Tuesday with the Media Daily News, Williams made it clear that safety would come before anything else. He said that climbers and crew had been well-trained and prepared. "Safety is first and television is second," Williams said Tuesday. "Everest is certainly no walk in the park, as many people know. It's the ultimate extreme location on the planet. There's nowhere you're going to get to where the air is thinner and there's more potential peril and risk," Williams said. In a report posted on OLN's Web site, climber Chris Warner said the 13-member team had made it to 27,400 in good shape. Mount Everest is 29,035 feet high and extremely dangerous. OLN said only about half of the people who begin to climb the mountain complete it, and a number have died attempting it. Warner said that on the most recent leg of their climb, the team came upon and treated a man with a broken fibula and two Japanese women with cerebral edemas. Weather conditions were pegged at 35 mph going up the mountain and a temperature of about 20 degrees.
After nine years in Canada, during which it racked up considerable support from pharmaceutical advertisers as well as plaudits for its sensitive and intelligent handling of a difficult subject, Schizophrenia Digest has set its U.S. launch for next month. The quarterly publication, written not only for people afflicted with the disease but also their families and doctors, has set an initial circulation figure of 25,000. Unlike many publishers, Schizophrenia Digest founder Bill MacPhee has an innate level of insight into the needs of his readers. MacPhee was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1987 at age 24. Following several years of treatment and a suicide attempt, he emerged looking for his life's work. After hearing about a woman who sold a self-produced magazine about soap operas to her friends (and eventually many others), he decided to give publishing a go. MacPhee admits that finding financing for the magazine was an uphill battle. "You can imagine somebody with schizophrenia going to a bank manager and asking for a loan," he remembers. "Essentially, I had to launch the magazine without any advertiser support. Talking about it wasn't enough; I had to have a product that people could see." With help from his family, MacPhee cobbled together $60,000 and went to work. The first issue of the Canadian edition of Schizophrenia Digest in 1994 had a print run of 2,500 copies; the magazine is up to 50,000 copies of at least 44 pages each. It's not exactly Reader's Digest in terms of reach or circulation, but it has certainly exceeded expectations. "People would always ask me, 'How are you ever going to find enough to write about?'" MacPhee recalls. "I always told them to look at the number of golf magazines out there. I mean, how much can you write about golf?" Similarly, the magazine's audience is not as limited as one might think. In addition to individuals suffering from schizophrenia, the magazine is being marketed to their families as well as psychiatrists. For advertising support, MacPhee has relied on the pharmaceutical industry ("medication is the foundation of schizophrenia treatment"), with Bristol-Myers Squibb, Janssen Pharmaceutica, Eli Lilly and Pfizer serving as the mag's primary benefactors. For the upcoming U.S. launch, scheduled for the National Mental Health conference in Washington D.C. in a few weeks, MacPhee has maintained the same roll of primary sponsors. When asked if he plans to expand beyond the pharma category, he responds, "We're focusing on pharma right now, because that's what worked best in Canada." He does, however, hold out hope for a more diverse roster of advertisers in the future: "As we grow, we'll be able to do more mainline advertising. Just because somebody suffers from schizophrenia doesn't mean that they don't buy running shoes or jeans." Another target is automobile manufacturers; MacPhee believes that such companies might be lured by the many doctors that he hopes will read the magazine regularly. As for the future, MacPhee is unflinchingly optimistic. "If we prove ourselves within the next six months, we'll go from quarterly to six issues per year," he says. "There was no doubt in my mind when we launched in Canada that we'd be a success, and I feel the same way about the U.S."