• by David L. Smith , February 3, 2003

The other night at dinner, a fellow media maven asked me if I thought that this was the year that the upfront was going to go cross-media. I started to answer no, for all of the usual reasons: few sellers understand all the media in a deal, there are no agreed upon methods between buyer and seller to set the relative valuations for the various media types, packages like this need to be planned, then bought rather than sold, etc.

We got into talking about the barriers, and another surfaced. THE UPFRONT MARKETPLACE IS AT THE WRONG TIME OF YEAR. Now don’t get me wrong, the timing is perfect for a broadcast marketplace with a September start of the new show year. But every year, more and more shows are launched outside of the September timeframe anyway. So it is tradition, more than anything else, that dictates the timing of May-June for Primetime, with most other dayparts and cable efforts following (the kid market being an exception in many years.)

More clients are on a calendar fiscal year than any other time. As a result, budgets have generally not been determined or plans developed for the next year when the upfront period commences. So much of the buying is done on theory with intricate cancellation clauses.

Today, many clients WANT integration. But they plan in the summer and fall for the next year. It is September or October before many plans are in place.

Therefore, if the upfront market wants to include other media, the major media companies would do well to change their thinking to the client perspective and timing. That’s right, move the upfront to the period when most advertisers and agencies are considering their cross-media, integrated, multi-media or “whatever else you want to call it” plans.

The upfront could then start by sellers and buyers having a conversation as to what kinds of overall media packages made the most sense. A quarterly supplemental market could then be put in place for clients whose fiscals are April, July or other timing.

In this way, the market meets the buyer’s needs, and sellers conform to buyer requirements. This is the way that buyer and seller markets are supposed to work, selling something consistent with client goals, rather than something with inappropriate timing, just because it has always been done that way.

I understand that I am like a fish swimming upstream with this argument. It is hard to make such a dramatic change in such a large marketplace. But is seems that many of the media companies are in dire straits. As such, they need to consider radical changes to their selling model if they really want to effective sell cross-media packages. In that light, why shouldn’t the timing of the market be on the table along with the other issues?

David L. Smith is President and CEO of Mediasmith, Inc.