• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, May 4, 2010

It happens every upfront season: the threat that TV dollars will be moved to other media platforms.

For decades, that other media platform was the cable networks. Now, of course, it's much more scattered around new technologies -- which would seem to suggest some marketers would be making good on their threats.

Actually, this is now past tense: Last season, broadcast networks did witness money leaving, by some 20%. But guess what? The money left other media, too. Thanks to the crushingly weak economy cable, outdoor, radio -- and yes, even portions of the Internet - were part of the big fall.

That doesn't mean one day a sizable drop will happen in a regular, healthy marketplace, one that sees modest price hikes. To fulfill clients' demands, media agency executives will offer up choices, writing up plans to buy cinema advertising, do video on demand deals, digital billboards, or make upfront Internet video pacts.

Networks aren't flinching yet, since they know that, right now, they still hold a lot of marketing cards.

Taking-money-elsewhere threats can be mostly deemed experiments; maybe 1% to 5% of marketing budgets might change radically.  But few are willing to risk much more. History is on TV's side when it comes to marketing products -- even if no one is exactly sure how that marketing happens.

In 2004, one innovative-thinking marketing executive  working for Mitsubishi Motors North America, Ian Beavis, took the dramatic step 4 of shifting all dollars away from broadcast network TV because of its high costs. Less than a year later he was gone from the company.

For the last several years, Johnson & Johnson has supposedly not been buying TV in the upfront process but rather in the fourth quarter, making those more-or-less calendar year deals that cable networks are familiar with for a handful of other marketers.

If indeed J&J recreated that effort in late 2009, it would have gotten hit with some of the biggest scatter-price hikes seen in some time -- and would have lost out on one of the best deals in quite some time for buying broadcast or cable TV.

Some threats are not threats. Marketers have businesses to run and different sales timetables to address. Even though procurement officers at companies are fast getting the upper hand, some companies still need to test other strategies. Marketing is a moving target, but TV is still a big part of it.