• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, August 6, 2007

Oxygen took three weeks to do an eBay auction deal with Intel  -- and it only conversed with its media agency by email.

Couldn't they have just picked up the phone and made it happen sooner? 

It's understandable a mid-level cable network, with 73 million subscribers, would do all it could to add to its stable of advertisers. Intel doesn't seem like the first choice for a female-oriented network - so, good for Oxygen.

One major reason most cable programmers don't like the eBay auction system is that it takes away any fine adjustments -- extra marketing like product integration, billboards and the like -- in the negotiation. What should be an efficiency move winds up being a media exercise.

Couldn't the New York-based advertising executives at Oxygen make a phone call to Intel's New York-based media agency, Universal McCann? Hell, they could have hopped in a cab and had a face-to-face meeting.

The bottom line is that Oxygen won the business -- though it isn't known which other cable networks competed in the auction for Intel's money. 

Cable networks semi-interested in the eBay system never assumed any Internet media auction system would replace a large part of their overall buying efforts.

The goal was to hand over regular advertisers' run-of-schedule mundane media buying to no-brainer negotiation. Media agency buyers would say this ad inventory was akin to treating it like a commodity.

But that's not what Oxygen did here. Instead, it used the system to grab a new advertiser. Typically, a cable network that gets a new piece of business relishes it and looks to make a bigger splash for the client, with some product integration or other marketing benefits.

Oxygen should have come up for air and grabbed a little face time.