WAS THAT A FREUDIAN SLIP, OR WAS IT SIMPLY THE NETWORKS GETTING THE SLIP? - We have a wise friend who also happens to be an expert about the national TV advertising marketplace and after years of studying - and participating in - the vagaries, idiosyncrasies and seemingly illogical nature of the network upfront advertising marketplace, has come up with the only logical conclusion for the way media buyers typically behave when the networks' push comes to shove: they become irrational. Why else, he asks, would they allow the sellers of a commodity set the timing, the pace and …

AMID THE NEARLY DEAFENING RATINGS SPIN surrounding the end of the official 2004-05 prime-time season, not to mention Nielsen's May ratings sweep, it's hard to know exactly who actually won. Chest-beating aside, it wasn't ABC, CBS, Fox, or even cable network TV that won. It was medium of television itself. At a time when the Internet, videogames, iPods, cell phones and a host of other new electronic technologies are supposedly cannibalizing on the time people spend with their boob tubes, more people watched TV during the 2004-05 prime-time season than during 2003-04.

THE STUFF THAT UPFRONT DREAMS ARE MADE OF -- It's nice to see ABC back where it belongs: In the prime-time catbird's seat, pulling trade press strings and stoking the upfront marketplace. It's just like old times. Like all those years when the Six Sigma karate geeks at General Electric were calling all the shots were nothing but a really bad and very boring dream. Suddenly, we've woken to find ourselves back on the other side of the television rainbow, with Auntie Em, Jake, and Marv, and you and you and you. Except this isn't Kansas, and it's hard to …

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT FOR THE PITS - We know fears about commercial avoidance are reaching new heights on Madison Avenue, but when a friend forwarded us a newspaper cover story today about a new initiative to promote the ad industry we were a little surprised by its tone and tenor, not to mention the strategy of the effort. "National Advertising Board Launches 'Advertising: Get the Message!' Campaign," proclaimed the headline of the story about the industry's new $32 million campaign, which the paper said broke in major markets nationwide on Monday.

HOW MANY WAYS ARE THERE TO ORDER A CUP OF COFFEE AT STARBUCKS? - Until Monday, we thought there were only two: A tall mochachino with skim milk; iced if the weather is particularly warm out. As it turns out, there are precisely 19,000 variations on the Starbucks coffee theme. Who knew? The highly caffeinated team at OMD did. Aside from being a lot of lattes, it apparently is also an important thing to understand if you want to be a modern day media planner. Why? Because all those java apps aren't simply conversation for a coffee klatch, they're a …

MEDIUM COOL -- We've always considered radio something of a misunderstood medium, but until this week we never understood precisely how misunderstood it actually was. As it turns out, there are precisely eight major misconceptions about the medium.

PERISCOPE DOWN - This just in: A well-placed source tells the Riff that subscribers are flushing their Newsweek renewal offers - and the last vestiges of American journalistic credibility - down the toilet. Oops! Wait.

FOLLOWING PLENTY OF BULL, THE UPFRONT MAY PROVE TO BE A BEAR - In recent years, the prelude to the upfront network TV ad marketplace seems to have stretched and grown ever more cluttered and far noisier with marketing hype, portentous research, buyer/seller positioning, and of course, predictions for market outcomes than each preceding year. And the build-up to 2005-06 has been no different. We've seen a barrage of trade ads, including an especially aggressive and in-your-face marketing assault by the magazine publishing industry (see item below). We've seen new research from the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau and Turner Broadcasting Sales. …

IN NIELSEN WE TRUST, ALL OTHERS MAY BASH -- We are too young to remember "old time" radio, but we've always been big fans of Jean Shepard, and have secretly craved the kind of "Little Orphan Annie" secret decoder rings he wrote about in his wonderfully nostalgic book, "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash." So when the Television Bureau of Advertising Bureau offered us one in an email today, we naturally read on.

TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY SIX MILLION CHANNELS ON AND STILL NOTHING TO WATCH -- Ordinarily, when we hear the words "nano" and "television" used together we think of Robin Williams. Williams, we recall, played the improvisational alien character Mork on ABC's hilarious lowbrow '70s sitcom "Mork & Mindy.