• by April 6, 2005

UPFRONT 101 -- If you're like us, you're probably still a bit confused about how the whole upfront thing works. Well, just in time for this year's festivities, ABC is offering an upfront "tutorial." Actually, it's a webcast presentation Mike Shaw, president of sales and marketing for the ABC Television Network, will be making Thursday on the mechanics of the upfront for the clients of Deutsche Bank Securities, and readers of the Riff who feel like clicking here at 12:30 p.m. (ET). Of course, if you happen to be busy schmoozing over one of the many pre-upfront lunches in which network sales executives try to pick your brains - and your budgets - fear not, the ABC investors site will replay the webcast through April 14. But don't expect Shaw to make any specific predictions about the outcome of the upfront. He's just going to explain how it works. And from what we can tell, it's going to work a lot better for ABC in this year's upfront than in some of the ones in the recent past.

"YOU KNOW, 50 YEARS AGO TODAY, PRINTER'S INK WAS THE BIBLE OF THE AD INDUSTRY" - There are two funny things about that statement. One is that the first time we heard it we didn't even know what Printer's Ink was. That was 15 years ago, and we've since learned it was a trade publication that once dominated the advertising industry, at a time when its namesake medium - print - ruled the day. The other funny thing about that statement was who said it: Rance Crain, editor-in-chief of Advertising Age, and the son of G.D. Crain Jr., the man who founded Crain Communications, eventually launched Ad Age and ultimately drove Printer's Ink into the red and out of business. Why Rance would tell us that, we're not sure. We think he was simply proud of what his father had accomplished, and the role that Ad Age had attained in the years that followed, becoming not just the bible of the ad industry, but the marketing world's newspaper of record.

The occasion for that comment was an anniversary celebration for Crain Communications itself, and we were hoisting flutes of champagne when Rance confided that fact, but his suggestion that industry-ruling institutions could come and go never left us, even after we left Ad Age. Thankfully, 15 years later, Crain and Ad Age are still very much around. That's a good thing for the ad industry. It's a good thing for the marketing world. And it's even a good thing for us. It gives us something to shoot for - when we're not hung up on shooting at it. That said, we'd also like to congratulate the Crain folks on the 75th anniversary of Ad Age. We just didn't have the big bucks to shell out for a testimonial ad in last week's commemorative issue.

SPEAKING OF BIG BUCKS, ANNIVERSARIES AND TESTIMONIAL ADS RUNNING IN THE HALLOWED PAGES OF ADVERTISING AGE -- Did anyone else notice something unusual about this week's "Discovery at 20 Special Commemorative of Advertising Age" issue. Aside from the fact that Ad Age is precisely 55 years and one week older than Discovery Channel? The unusual thing was that some of the ads appearing in the section came from media agencies. Specifically, there were ads from PHD, OMD, MPG, and Initiative Media. What's so unusual about that? Well, normally you'd see media companies advertising in sections commemorating the anniversaries of ad agencies, not the other way around. Also, we really don't recall seeing media shops advertise much, if at all. With other big anniversaries looming this year, including CNN's 25th, we wonder if we'll be seeing other's follow suit?

Meanwhile, we think some other shops - noticeably Carat, MindShare, Mediaedge:cia, Starcom, MediaVest, Zenith, Optimedia, Universal McCann, Magna Global, Horizon Media, and others - were conspicuous by their absence. After all, it shouldn't be sufficient that they spend millions of their client's ad budgets buying time on cable networks like Discovery, they should also be spending - well, whatever it is they paid Ad Age -- their own bucks advertising on behalf of those cable networks. Makes sense, doesn't it?

And while we're guilting media shops into thinking about advertising in the trade press, t, we might as well point out that Media magazine is planning its own anniversary issue commemorating the anniversary of Al Gore inventing the Internet. Okay, so we're not, but we would like you to start budgeting for the supplement we plan to run 20 years from now commemorating Al Gore's launch of Current.