• by October 6, 2005

ADAGE.COM, OCTOBER 7, 2010 -- Three years after Madison Avenue finally broke the broadcast networks' stranglehold over the national TV ad business, the Big 2 media buying shops - Aegis' Group A-Z and InterpubliCom's Western International Media - are poised to begin negotiations for the 2009-10 network Post-Buy Marketplace, reports ad industry bible MediaPost.VNU.com.

"We think we have enough data now to accurately estimate audience shares for last season. We're finally ready to begin post-buy talks with ABC, the first broadcast network to adopt a full broadband strategy, and the only surviving broadcast network," Andy Donchin, chief engagement officer of Group A-Z's Video Ventures Unit, told this minute's edition of M.VNU's MediaMomentNews.

Group A-Z is the corporate-level media negotiating unit Aegis created after it surprised both Madison Avenue and Wall Street, and frankly, quite a few French guys, by its simultaneous acquisitions of Havas, Publicis Groupe and WPP Group, making it the second largest buyer of media in the world. The biggest, of course, is Western International Media, the entity created when Interpublic acquired Omnicom, merging Initiative Media, Universal McCann, OMD and PHD into a consolidated media agency.

"You try building a consensus with that many tough negotiators in one room," InterpubliCom CEO Mark Rosenthal said about his controversial decision to resurrect the Western brand. "For a while, we were seriously leaning toward United Ventures Agents, or UVA, but that didn't sit too well with Nick Brien who looked like he was getting ready to pop someone one, so we agreed to go back to our roots."

With Madison Avenue's most recent wave of consolidation behind it, agency executives said they could once again focus on the business of buying media - instead of each other. Citing anonymous sources, MMN reported that post-buy prices for ABC's hit early evening infotainment series "World News Tonight With Katie Couric and Jon Stewart" is now the most expensive regularly scheduled show on television, fetching an average price of $700,000 per three-second unit, beating the previous record holder, the 2008-09 series finale of "Lost," which attracted buys as high as $695,000 per :3.

Video ventures officers contacted by MMN, meanwhile, said "Lost" spin-off series - "Lost In Space" - is now the third highest-ranking series of the 2009-10 season, behind Disney Time Warner's syndicated People magazine. "The smartest thing we ever did was scrap the print publishing model," boasted Bonnie Fuller, president and branded content director of DTW's Time Inc. unit. "We always suspected MRI was under-representing our readership numbers. Who would have thought we'd have even higher viewership."

In fact, while "World News Tonight," People, and "Lost In Space," are the three highest-rated shows of last season according to industry bean-counter erinMedia, the gross media delivery of their parent companies doesn't even come close to personal video network Blinkz, which has emerged as the largest supplier of GRPs in the post-buy marketplace. Though the cume rating of the average Blinkz nanocast was only a 0.000001, the micromedia network's million-plus videocasts give it a greater rating than both ABC and Time Inc. combined.