• by David Kaplan , October 5, 2004

It was billed as a heavyweight bout, but Monday night's co-called "Night of the Media Heavyweights" looked something more like a battle royal style wrestling match, with smaller, more agile and more finely targeted medium trying to pin the broadcast nets to the mat.

Refereed by Carat America's CEO David Verklin, the battle, the second annual one to be hosted by researcher Dynamic Logic, almost immediately put broadcast television on the defensive versus a tag team assault from panelists representing cable, direct marketing, the Internet, magazines, newspapers, radio, outdoor, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Advertising Research Foundation, food marketer Kraft, and an editor at Mediaweek.

Here's how the judges--191 attendees using a live electronic survey system--scored it: A plurality of 35 percent said network television faces the toughest road ahead.

In response, the designated "advocate" for the broadcast nets, Mike Shaw, president for sales and marketing for ABC, said TV was an easy target, since it's the largest and most popular traditional medium.

"Remember how many marketers threatened to hold money back from the upfront this past year?" Shaw asked the panel. "When the dust settled, the answer was clear: none."

Still, he acknowledged that the rising cost of commercial airtime was the most difficult hurdle for network television to manage. "The networks spent $12 billion on content generation last year," he said. "What other medium has had to carry that burden?"

Shaw also alluded to the fact that new technologies that offer greater ability to target via a variety of demographic and psychographic data have tended to diminish the value of a mass market vehicle like network TV.

Nevertheless, he took the criticism in stride. "When it comes to cross media integration, network TV has four things to offer at levels unmatched by other media: content, distribution, ratings, and reach."

Naturally, Sean Cunningham, CEO of the Cable Advertising Bureau, didn't have to beg to differ.

"We have 50 networks, the ability to target, the additional access to content via video-on-demand, and we have the ratings--more than half of the entire TV universe," Cunningham countered.

Still, it was the Internet that continues to capture the imagination of marketers. Only 2 percent of the attendees expressed the fear that online advertising faced the most difficult battle versus other media.

"The growth of broadband has brought advertisers back to the Internet, for the basic reason that consumers are spending more time online," said Michael Zimbalist, president of the Online Publishers Association. "And consumers want broadband for content, not because they'll be able to [instant message]. And that content is ad-supported."

Nearly suffering as much audience antipathy as the networks, 28 percent said newspapers were likely to come up against greater losses of audience share and revenues.

"People don't realize that when you're talking about newspapers, you're talking about the No. 1 or 2 local media Web site, since most people like to view their paper online more than anything else," said John Sturm, president-CEO of the Newspaper Association of America. "We embody everything positive about media neutrality and cross-media marketing."

And leave it to the marketer--the ultimate arbiter of whether cross-media is worth it--to cast the final call.

"We're continually trying to improve our effectiveness," Barbara Singer, director of strategic media information at Kraft, weighed in. "The industry is overdue for a shape up in terms of research and in balancing the ingredients in the media mix."