It's TV upfronts week and with that comes all the attendant frenzy of star-studded dog-and-pony shows, show trailers and prognostications about TV ad spending.
The New York Times' Jim
Rutenberg argues that TV has been upended by consumers. "In the not-too-long run, network television could come to look nothing like it does today. Maybe you will be surfing apps instead of channels,
as the Apple chief executive Tim Cook predicts, skipping between shows that don’t have commercial breaks or hard-and-fast 30- and 60-minute time limits." There are signs that ad-buying agencies
are moving more dollars to digital. Magna Global signaled its intent two weeks ago to shift $250 million of its clients' ad dollars to YouTube from traditional TV. Of course, that's a fraction of the
"many billions Magna spends on television every year for clients that include Coca-Cola and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. But it was a large enough diversion of television dollars to digital media to be
of real symbolic importance. Magna pointed to declines in old-fashioned television viewing among those between the ages of 18 and 49, who are important to advertisers," the
Times reports.
“What we are trying to do is signal to the market that it is not business as usual,” David Cohen, the U.S. president of Magna Global, told me last week. “Consumers have over the past
several years been migrating away from linear television, and we need to acknowledge that.”
Read the whole story at The New York Times »
