• by June 4, 2004

As the broadcast upfronts hurtle along their convoluted course, there is more buzz popping up about marketers' willingness to shift dollars from broadcast TV into other media, most notably, Web media.

Ask anyone in the media business for a "guestimate" on just how many dollars are shaking loose, and no one is willing to pony up. For starters, the upfronts aren't finished yet. But it's also a hard estimate to come up with given the fact that some online media deals are bundled with broadcast and cable offerings, and most common are the add-ons and one-offs. How do you slice and dice the numbers?

There is also the fact that online media sellers, no different than offline media sellers, want to get the highest possible premium for their inventory. In the case of online media, there are numerous kinds of inventory, ad formats, streaming video and the like. What does the pricing look like at this stage in the game? What are the CPMs?

Online sellers have perpetuated scarcity myths--of course, there is scarce inventory in select areas within publishers' sites, but there is plenty of what's referred to as "run of site" inventory. Plenty. And that remains a challenge for most sellers. Whoever can figure out what to do with it, how to package it and sell it wins a creative media award.

Programming is another issue for online media. And here too, many publishers and portals are stepping up their offerings. You have to have excellent programming and exclusive programming to lure eyeballs and ad dollars. What good is streaming ads on the Web if you don't have decent content? And you have to market that content, no differently than the broadcast and cable TV nets do.

Some of the most exciting developments in online media are taking place within the context of broadband video. This is the context within which online media sellers and strategists are creating waves within the traditional broadcast upfront. In recent conversations with media executives, I have sensed a pulse-quickening excitement.

One exec who attended the iMedia Summit in Maryland last week found AOL's presentation on broadband fairly promising. "I think they can deliver on a lot of it. AOL is the site people love to hate and underestimate, and they certainly have issues, but some of the concerts and the unique things you can get through AOL ... [are pretty good]," he confided. Yahoo!'s Launch, he noted, offers a similar approach to music programming and exclusives. Another online media exec I spoke with this week told me it will be difficult to figure out what percentage of the $200-$250 million his agency will pull in this year is related to media booked in conjunction with the upfronts. And this is a guy who sits at the grownup's table with his offline broadcast TV buying counterparts.

"There are some serious dollars being spent," he said. "This [online] is no longer a 3 to 5 percent allocation, you're potentially going to get what you've been clamoring for." He sees dollars that would have been spent on TV, shifting to broadband video buys. But these buys are less about bundling online with upfront inventory, than about add-ons.

"It's not [happening] without some arm-twisting, old gum and Popsicle sticks," the exec says, but "Next spring, we'll start to see some standardization of metrics and integrated proposals earlier on in the [upfront] process."