• Ad Age, Wednesday, September 5, 2007 12 PM

Inventory in this fall's NFL season is hard -- and expensive -- to come by after an upfront that had advertisers paying top prices for prime ad time and saw CPM increases of as much as 25% for programs like NBC's "Sunday Night Football." One reason is that football is among the rare breeds of programming shown to be the most "TiVo-proof," which means marketers know their ads are being seen the moment they air or by night's end on DVR.

At the same time, top categories like movies and retail like doing business on the old Nielsen standard of program ratings, one metric that ESPN was able to negotiate exclusively this year. The sports net's ad chief, Ed Erhardt, reports "extremely limited inventory" going into the second season it has carried "Monday Night Football." He says the net is "better sold this year than we were last year, and last year, we were really well sold."

For Miller Brewing, "football is a very competitive time of year for beer marketers," says spokesman Pete Marino. "You need to have a good brand and the right partners." The brand buys into all the nets that air the NFL -- Fox, NBC, CBS and ABC -- but will spend most of its money this year with ESPN in a multiplatform deal.

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