• by February 23, 2005

AND THE WINNER IS… ABC -- Just when we thought the hype surrounding advertising buys on a big TV event was over, a new round of TV advertising buzz has been dumped in our laps. No, it’s not some residual ad spin from the Super Bowl that ran on Fox earlier this month, but Oscar adfest that will take place Sunday night when ABC broadcasts the Academy Awards. You know, the “Super Bowl for women,” or guys like us who’re more into silver screen flicks than gridiron blitzes.

We all know Oscar ad hype, like the Super Bowl’s, has been growing in recent years, but we were surprised when we got a pitch from a word-of-mouth marketing firm that it was going to conduct an “extensive” study of the most popular entertainment and Oscar-oriented blogs and online communities to gauge the impact before and after the Feb. 27 telecast.

"The biggest night in Hollywood is also one of the most talked about events of the year for the blogosphere," explained CEO Pete Snyder, CEO of WOM agency New Media Strategies. The last time we witnessed that kind of buzz monitoring was in the deluge of market research initiatives surrounding the Big Game, and its attendant water cooler talk.

What’s surprising us isn’t that these are big TV events, but that they are now part of a much bigger marketing arena that needs to be tracked, quantified and assessed separately from the media buy itself. The Oscars, the Super Bowl, series finales, the odd one-time-only event, have always been big TV stories, and have always generated plenty of buzz, PR, and of course, high tune-in factors. Years ago, former NBC West Coast President Don Ohlmeyer referred to these as network TV’s “tent poles,” events so big, they could prop up a network’s entire tent. In retrospect, the circus-like allusion is proving an especially apt one, as TV events become the greatest shows on earth for TV advertisers and buzz marketers alike.

All this is good for the networks that create or license these big events, especially perpetual Oscar network ABC, which had the foresight to lock up long-term rights with the motion picture academy. It’s something that helped ABC during its lean years, and which should give it an extra boost during its comeback year. How much extra won’t be clear until Madison Avenue posts Sunday night’s ad buys, but based on ABC’s recent sales history, it has been eking a considerable amount of extra mileage out of the awards show. Over the past dozen years, the average price per 30- second spot on the Oscars has risen 147 percent from $607,800 in 1993 to $1,503,100 last year, according to data compiled by Nielsen Monitor-Plus. Not only that, but ABC has been cramming more of those pricey ad units into the show. Last year, ABC ran 54 30-second units during its Oscar telecast, 26 percent more than it aired in 1993.

Academy Awards Advertising Spending

Year	Cost Per :30
1993	$607,800
1994	$643,500
1995	$700,000
1996	$795,000
1997	$850,000
1998	$950,000
1999	$1,000,000
2000	$1,305,000
2001	$1,450,000
2002	$1,290,000
2003	$1,354,800
2004	$1,503,100

Source: Nielsen Monitor-Plus.