• by May 20, 2004

When will the Web begin to take dollars from broadcast media?

That's the $64 million question fluttering around the margins of this week's broadcast network upfronts. The splashy, self-congratulatory celebrations have dominated the week's advertising and marketing news.

Most in the interactive industry say they don't want online upfronts--they don't want to recreate a system that almost everyone concedes, both publicly and privately, is broken. They also don't want to degrade pricing or commoditize online advertising.

Yet, we know that in some product categories there are mini-upfronts, or "advance" selling opportunities. The automotive, entertainment, and retail categories are good examples. There's also quite a bit of "advance" selling of broadband streaming media this year. America Online, ESPN.com, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Yahoo! are particularly well-positioned to take advantage of such opportunities as advertisers look to repurpose video assets and create online/offline media packages. If AOL can get it together, this is where it could shine--by constructing ad packages to support AOL for Broadband that blend with advertisers' buys on the WB and in Time Inc. properties--both off- and online.

So while most media sellers are skeptical of any sort of online upfront, at least an organized one, they're not shy about reminding advertisers during the upfront frenzy that they should shift more dollars into online media. MSN sent its butterflies out to the upfronts to distribute handbills reminding media strategists and advertisers that consumers are in front of multiple screens--not just the TV screen.

And Yahoo!'s ad sales czarina Wenda Harris Millard told analysts at Piper Jaffray's tech conference in New York that the Internet giant was poised to take ad dollars away from marketers' TV budgets. Millard told the group the shift would be noticeable in 2005. Her counterpart at MSN, Joanne Bradford, wants to see 8- to 12 percent of marketers' media budgets earmarked for online spending--this year. Among the big online properties like AOL, MSN and Yahoo!, the pressure is on to lock in premium positions early. I'm told they sell out--early. Is it hype or reality? I suspect it's a little bit of both.

Are advertisers heeding the urgency? If they want to deepen their relationships with 18-34-year-olds, they should pay attention.