• Business Week, Monday, May 22, 2006 12:16 PM

If consumers' habits are not quick to change, Business Week's Jon Fine posits that advertisers' are even slower--and nowhere is that more apparent than in the upfront buying season. "This is all very old-school stuff: vaudevillian dazzle, copious applications of food and alcohol to lubricate the ad spigots, a frenzy of dealmaking primarily compressed into several days in one city" he writes. "And all the more so in a TiVo'd, rapidly digitizing world. But the upfront ritual keeps chugging along, and the advertisers keep buying it.... Even though the rites come amid a steady string of digital TV initiatives and the onward march of digital-video-recorder use, the nastiest thing people will say about the event is that dollars may drop slightly."

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