By Catharine P. Taylor | Jun 15, 2010
BNET by CBS
I really should have seen this coming, but the cable TV upfront ad sales market is resembling the just-concluded network upfront in one way I hadn’t anticipated. Some nets, per Mediapost, are playing the ad inventory scarcity card to get more ad dollars in the door.
In brief, the scarcity card is what you play when your ratings start to go down. It’s s a game the broadcast networks have been playing for years, largely by convincing advertisers they need to buy more TV inventory to reach the same number of people they did back when ratings were higher. (God forbid the advertisers should go find those missing viewers where they are, like on YouTube or Facebook.) The reason some high profile cable networks are playing the card now is that, just like their network counterparts, they’re beginning to see erosion — of as much as 11 percent — in the key 18-49 demo.
The scarcity card seems to be working its magic in cable, just as it has in broadcast. Cable is experiencing CPM increases of as much as ten percent, and may wrap up business taking in upwards of $7.5 billion, a very healthy double-digit increase over last year’s recession-battered performance. By that logic, you’d almost think that when TV executives get together in private, they really all pray for no one to watch their shows.
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