The cable TV industry today will launch the first significant salvo of the 2005-06 upfront planning season, releasing research designed to dispel perceptions that the major broadcast networks have made inroads with hits like ABC's "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost." Cable's upfront pitch comes at a crucial point in the upfront planning process, just days before top media planners and buyers are scheduled to meet in New Orleans for their annual conference, and a week before the syndication industry hosts Madison Avenue at its annual conference in New York. It also comes as dozens of individual cable networks begin ramping up their own upfront sales pitches in an array of events that will build through March and April into May when the major broadcast networks unveil their new prime-time schedules and the upfront buying season officially gets underway. The timing of the new research, being released today by the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, is intended to sway the way media planners think in an effort to influence both the size of cable ad budgets, as well as the timing of the upfront marketplace. In short, the cable industry is hoping for a repeat of last year's upfront when cable ad deals preempted the broadcast networks' and nearly a billion dollars moved to cable. "People are going to start making decisions over the next 30 days," says Sean Cunningham, president of the CAB. Due to the consolidation of media buying into a handful of shops, and the fact that they now all plan and buy across a much wider scale of TV options, Cunningham says there has been a push to move the planning cycle up and to drill deeper down into TV viewing patterns to help make upfront buying decisions. "It seems to be moving up a couple of weeks every upfront. A whole lot is being pored through right now, and we're being asked for this stuff," claims Cunningham, explaining why the CAB is releasing the new research, an intricately detailed analysis of the first 20 weeks of the 2004-05 prime-time season, with plenty of bullet points designed to debunk broadcast TV's perceived inroads. The deck, which will be distributed this week to more than 300 key media planning and buying executives, and which will be made available in its entirety on the CAB's onetvworld.org Web site, takes a particular jab at the broadcast networks' lucrative Thursday night franchise, as well as Friday and Saturday night. The research claims the broadcast networks are losing ground, while cable is growing on those nights, which are crucial for especially valuable advertising categories like automotive and movie marketers, who rely on weekend traffic for the bulk of their sales. A copy of the CAB deck previewed by MediaDailyNews was so chockfull of numbers and fine print that its likely to make even the youngest media planners' eyes squint, but Cunningham says it is just the kind of data they've been asking for, noting that there's already been an extraordinary amount of traffic to the CAB's site, even before it's posted the new research. "This level of drill down is really based on demand from our customers," he explains. "We've seen our website traffic counts double during the month of February. Typically, we get about 400 discrete visits a day. We've seen 800 in the month of February so far."
Last week, a jury found former Ogilvy & Mather executives Shona Seifert and Thomas Early guilty of scheming to overbill the government's $1 billion Office of National Drug Control Policy account to cover a $3 million revenue shortfall on the business. The case hinged on executives padding time sheets to recoup the revenue shortfalls, and agencies are all said to be heavily scrutinizing the billing methods to ensure that they aren't the next target. Industry observers say that the guilty verdicts in the ONDCP case will spur agencies to enact strict reforms. "I think that the time sheet system is out of date, and probably the only thing that this episode will do is accelerate the examination of how agencies charge clients for services," said Tom Rosenwald, managing director with Ray & Berndtson, an executive search firm. "The process needs to become more transparent, and I think clients need to get agreements on staffing upfront, as opposed to negotiating with agencies after--and that way, everyone knows what they're getting and what they're paying for." The issue is going to become one of clients and agencies evaluating the scope of the work, which includes detailed staffing plans and charging accordingly, Rosenwald added. Once you map out the scope of the work, how many people are needed to complete it, and what the level of complexity is, you can then sit down if something changes and deal with it--as opposed to people simply counting minutes and hours. And that's how most consulting businesses, including law firms, tend to operate these days. One company that provides such "scope of work planning" models is Farmer & Company, a New York-based consultancy that has worked with such agencies as J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam, and Grey Global Group, among others. Farmer began doing this in 1992 when he opened the company in London. The company's first client, ironically, was Ogilvy Europe. "The ONDCP arrangement with Ogilvy was unusual," Farmer said. "That contract literally had them being paid by the hour, and agencies are usually paid on a fee basis--and it's calculated at the start of the year, and a fixed number is settled on. But no one is generally paid hourly like that, and I feel bad for the people who made some bad decisions regarding the billing." In most cases, clients and agencies don't agree on a rigorous scope of work plan. But the fear of irregularities or fraud will cause clients and agencies to think harder about doing so, Farmer said. "I have a computer model that generates a scope of work and then creates a clear plan. The real value of this is that I force both sides to think about what the client really wants and what the agency can deliver in a clear way."
At the time when many in the online world are breathing a sigh of relief concerning proposed anti-spyware legislation, some big ad industry players including the Advertising Research Foundation, the Network Advertising Initiative, and research company comScore, are raising new concerns. On Feb. 17, The Advertising Research Foundation laid out some of its objections in an "open letter" posted on its Web site. "We are concerned that Section 3 of HR 29 may cause unintended consequences on market research businesses that measure and report on statistics regarding Internet usage," stated the ARF. Section Three requires companies to get permission from consumers before collecting certain types of information. But research industry watchdog CMOR says the bill isn't likely to have a adverse effect on Internet advertising or research. "Fundamentally, we find it sound," said Brian Dautch, director of government affairs for CMOR, the nonprofit Council for Marketing and Opinion Research, established by the American Marketing Association, Advertising Research Foundation, Council of American Survey Research Organizations, and Marketing Research Association. Initially, CMOR was very concerned about whether consent requirements would apply to cookies--and, says Dautch, "lobbied like heck, along with some other groups, to get cookies pulled out of it." comScore privacy officer Chris Lin says her company's concern is that the bill treats all tracking software the same. "We don't believe that we're spyware because we get user permission to download software and collect information," Lin says. The bill does not forbid companies to install tracking software, but requires them to get consumer permission first--which comScore already does. Therefore, the potential impact on comScore's current practices is limited; Lin says comScore possibly might have to change the wording of the notice and consent it gives panel members. But, she says, there might be other, more intangible consequences. "The label 'spyware' carries with it significant negative consequences," Lin says. Reportedly, some security companies that offer technology to strip adware and spyware programs already consider comScore a possible threat; HR 29 doesn't attempt to regulate the anti-adware/spyware industry. Trevor Hughes, executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative, complains that the bill shouldn't focus on the installation of software, but rather on the "fraudulent and deceptive practices that we can all point to." Hughes says that definitions of "install" and "software" are loose enough that the bill could apply to activity such as sending HTML to a user's computer. But others say that the FTC and the courts would never define those terms so expansively; otherwise, the bill would be absurdly broad, touching on almost every activity on the Internet. Congressional watchers expect the bill to sail through the House Energy Committee, perhaps as early as this week.
It's now Monday morning and Hollywood's best and brightest are staggering home from the Vanity Fair Oscar party following the Academy Awards. Elsewhere across America, the broadcast's largely female audience is preparing to shop--and, according to a survey conducted on behalf of MediaPost by Scarborough Research, the shopping patterns of the women who watched the Academy Awards reveals that they will likely be making high-end purchases in the apparel, health and beauty, and wine categories. (Scarborough culls its research from an ongoing national telephone survey of over 200,000 adults, covering 75 local U.S. markets). While it's uncertain how much attention the Costume Design category garners, women who watch the Academy Awards are approximately twice as likely as all consumers to have spent $500 or more on women's apparel during the last year, in categories such as business clothing and casual clothing/sportswear, Scarborough's survey said. And perhaps the Academy could add a food-related category, as female Oscar-watchers are 8 percent more likely than all consumers to have eaten in a sit-down restaurant five or more times during the past month. In particular, coffee houses, Italian restaurants, and upscale restaurants rank among the most popular dining out choices of women who tune into the Oscars broadcast. Hair and make-up are essential to movies, and apparently, they are just as crucial for women who care about films. Scarborough's research has found that women Academy Awards viewers are 48 percent more likely than all consumers to have made purchases of cosmetics, perfumes, or skin care items. Plus, they are 42 percent more likely than all consumers to have bought health and beauty items on the Internet during the past year. One of the smaller movies to get a lot of attention has been Alexander Payne's "Sideways," about two guys on a weeklong trip through California wine country. No word yet as to whether the film's highlighting of the joys of Pinot Noir have registered with women, but Scarborough reports that diet soda and bottled water are popular non-alcoholic beverage choices of the women who watch the Academy Awards, and champagne/sparkling wine and blush/rose wine are well-liked alcohol beverages of these consumers.
Warning: Satire Ahead! In a forthcoming book, former creative director Joseph Sankaco alleges that there is widespread abuse of Ritalin in the advertising industry. In his memoirs, "Prune Juiced," to be published by Adweek Books in April, Sankaco--who spent more than 30 years as creative director of Steel, Plunder, & Expence--writes that "nearly all of the big-name copywriters in the business today are juiced up on Ritalin," a drug frequently prescribed for children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. An underground black market in the drug developed when teenagers found that it helped focus the mind and provided abusers with a high degree of concentration. Teens now routinely take Ritalin in an attempt to achieve higher test scores. So, alleges Sankaco, do advertising copywriters. "Copywriters are under a lot of pressure," says Sankaco. "If they think a drug will give them an edge, they'll use it, no matter what the consequences to their health." Sankaco recalled that alcohol was the drug of choice for copywriters in the 50s "because, well, all the big-name authors were drunks, and it carried a certain cache to have three martinis at lunch. You'd be surprised how smart and funny you get after a pint or so of gin," he says. In the 60s and 70s, creatives experimented with illegal drugs hoping to bring that "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree" voice to their ad copy. "Yep, on Fridays we all went down to Goldberg's, sprinkled our pizza with marijuana, and expected to blind the boss with our brilliant copy that afternoon," says Sankaco. "But mostly we ate boxes of Twinkies and argued who was better--Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton. "Some guys on the entertainment accounts tried acid, but couldn't get beyond their colored pencils or cheering when the traffic lights outside the window changed from red to green to yellow." "Lots of them tried speed, but too often wrote tagline copy that went on for hundreds of lines--except they'd forget to turn the page, so the creative heads would get back yellow pads that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting." "Ecstasy was the next big rage, but then the copy had so many adjectives and superlatives that it was unusable. Now it's all about Ritalin." One copywriter at a major Midtown New York agency agreed to talk about his Ritalin use on the condition that his name not be used. GS: "Although nothing seems conclusive at this point, some argue that Ritalin use can be dangerous..." Juiced Copywriter: "Yeah, so is repeatedly watching 'The Apprentice.' Life is full of danger, but I need the drug to help me; uh, help me; um, help me..."GS: "Focus?" JC: "Yeah, that's it, focus. It puts me in the zone, man. I can really, uh, really; er, really."GS: "Concentrate?" JC: "Yeah, that's it, concentrate. Writing copy is an art and it takes a great deal of, um; what's that word? I just had it; um..."GS: "Drugs?" A spokesobfuscator for the American Association of Advertising Agencies says that Sankaco's charges are "baseless" and that there is no "drug problem of any kind in the advertising industry--uh, if you don't count cocaine as a drug." Co-workers of Sankaco's at Steel, Plunder, & Expence say that they never saw Sankaco take Ritalin or give it to anyone else, although they point out that he did win copywriting CLIOs 24 years in a row.