advertising

Baseball advertising appears to have pivoted from a months-long slump to hitting above average. Fox Corp. has sold more than 90% of its ad inventory in its share of games in Major League Baseball’s pandemic-truncated 2020 season, as well as all the ad berths in its planned broadcast of four games slated to air this Saturday on Fox Broadcasting and Fox Sports 1. Meanwhile,  Home Team Sports, the Fox-owned unit that sells ad time on 44 regional sports networks, is trying to accommodate a new rush of advertisers trying to get time in local broadcasts.

NBCUniversal is creating 11 new advertising formats for TV marketers to consider for their advertising efforts. Under its Content and Commercial Innovations effort, these formats are intended to offer better reach and engagement for marketers.

Terms related to protests were on “blocklists” companies use to avoid ad placements in sensitive content. News publishers say such moves effectively punish media companies for covering important issues.

A TVNewsCheck webinar on optimizing spot TV in this COVID-challenged economy last week found spot revenue picking up in some places, with steady rises since April’s low point. But concerns are afoot about Nielsen’s sample base and problems that may stem from its addition of broadband-only homes to the local TV currency.

U.S. advertising revenue fell 31% in May as the nation had only a handful of major sports events take place due to the coronavirus pandemic and most major ad categories cut back the amount of money they spent significantly — by 10% or more — according to Standard Media Index, a tracker of ad spending. Among specific types of advertisers, only pharmaceutical manufacturers spent more in May than they did in the year-earlier period.

Marketers are aware of a changing dynamic, with over half of buyers starting to move dollars out of linear and into CTV, according to the IAB. But consumers don’t necessarily see the difference in the two modes of TV delivery. According to a poll of over 1,100 Americans by Toluna and Tremor Video, 52% of people aged 18-34 and 54% of people 35-54 make no distinction between connected TV and cable or satellite TV. In other words, over half of young and middle-aged viewers simply call whatever they’re watching on their big screens “TV.”

Media agency Dentsu Aegis Network said it will be using data from TVision as part of its Attention Economy initiative, which aims to compare attention across all media channels to improve the impact of advertising. Dentsu’s agencies will utilize some aspects of TVision’s data, in parallel with proprietary insights tools, to plan TV/OTT campaigns based on attention metrics for the first time.

After months of scrambling to pull back, revise, delay and cancel ad campaigns because of the Covid-19 pandemic, marketers now can put a number to the impact on their industry. GroupM’s mid-year forecast shows a landscape that’s stark but salvageable.

Turkish telenovela adaptations, soccer programming, music and reality shows and amped-up news coverage are among the programming highlights of Univision’s 2020-21 content slate. The Spanish-language media giant hosted a virtual upfront presentation on Tuesday for media buyers. The event is likely to be the last public outing for Univision before it is sold to a consortium of new investors in the fall, led by former Viacom CFO Wade Davis’ Forgelight Media.

NBCUniversal’s upfront will be hosted by Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy and Tracy Jordan and be shown to the masses as a TV special, rather than an exclusive presentation for advertisers. NBC will air a TV special on July 16 that will bring back the cast of 30 Rock to tout NBCU’s 2020-21 programming. The hour-long, commercial-free event will premiere on NBC, and get a reboardcast the following day across USA Network, Bravo, E!, Oxygen, SYFY, and CNBC as well as being available to stream on Peacock. Along with 30 Rock castmembers, the special will feature guest appearances from talent from across NBCU’s portfolio.

Linda Yaccarino, the chairman of advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, is calling for “radical transformation” of the marketing business in the face of cultural change around racism and the impact of COVID-19 on the economy. The call comes a week after the Association of National Advertisers made proposals to transform the advertising business, including the timing of the upfront.

The new agreement allows advertisers and agencies easy access to Nexstar’s digital audience of 106 million monthly uniques and the broadcast industry’s widest reach of 63% of U.S. TV households gives them the ability to send orders electronically directly in their Strata workflow.

With the coronavirus pandemic spurring chaos across the U.S. economy, some of the TV networks’ best-known ambassadors to the advertising industry were called upon in recent weeks to speak with members of the Association of National Advertisers, an influential industry group representing 1600 companies that spend more than $400 billion each year on advertising and marketing. The big question: Can you help us?

In the throes of a pandemic, national television advertising revenues are expected to drop 13.2% this year and recover by 4.3% in 2021 according to a new forecast from major media buyer Magna Global. Even with heavy political spending in a presidential year, local TV is expected to be down 2.4% for 2020. After the election, a 14.5% drop in 2021 is expected. Core revenue for local TV is seen edging up 0.1% in 2021.

Five TV advertisers are pulling advertising on Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight after controversial remarks about the Black Lives Matter movement and protests in many cities, according to reports. Walt Disney, T-Mobile, Papa John’s, Vari and SmileDirectClub have all reportedly stopped scheduled advertising on the primetime Fox News Channel show.

A day after calling for “sweeping changes” to transform the ad industry’s inclusiveness and diversity, the Association of National Advertisers this morning issued another call for “sweeping changes” in the “media ecosystem,” and specifically called on the television advertising industry to move the annual upfront negotiating season from a spring/early summer marketplace purchasing a fourth quarter through third quarter broadcast year to a fall/winter marketplace purchasing a conventional calendar year.

The handful of competitions that have already aired prove just how eager advertisers and audiences are for any kind of live sports offering. Not only would live sports signal an important return to normal for the country, but they would also jump-start a TV ad sales marketplace that has been reeling.

Disney Advertising Sales says sports TV advertising deal-making is slowly ramping up — partly due to live sports coming back to TV over the next few months. “The sports marketplace has started to move,” says Rita Ferro, president of Disney Advertising Sales. “We are well on our way in terms of multi-year deals.”

It’s designed to help political buyers purchase more targeted campaigns ahead of 2020 election.

Confirming information from many other sources, national TV had a tough April, according to Standard Media Index. Broadcast network TV was down 33.4% to $907 million versus the same month a year ago. National TV cable networks were 24.8% lower to $1.66 billion.

The nation’s big media companies are trying to avoid great pressure from advertisers and media buyers to take severe cutbacks in ad rates in early talks as part of the industry’s annual upfront ad market, according to three executives familiar with discussions. Their pushback suggests owners of networks like CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox are betting that a return of favorite TV elements like sports will draw new interest from sponsors and generate more demand for TV commercials — and potentially help them avoid capitulating to the most onerous demands.

A new Nielsen analysis indicates that spot advertising in local markets appears to be starting to turn the corner after declining in some areas by as much as 35% at the end of March.

Enlightened businesses who will survive today’s challenging environment will realize the value of reaching customers via equally savvy media companies that can provide both core media products along with broader exposure for marketing messages via today’s emerging services like over-the-top, podcasting, geofencing, branded content and retargeted banners.

People are watching more television these days. But companies are spending less time, effort and money on TV ads.

Digital ad revenue rose 12% to $31.4 billion in the first quarter, with revenue starting to decline in March because of the Coronavirus outbreak, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. With businesses closed and demand down by the pandemic, publishers are getting lower digital ad prices with the biggest impact coming in display advertising, which is down 30% on a cost-per-thousand viewers basis, the IAB said based on a survey of digital ad sales executives.

A new spot by WAVE Louisville, Ky., is taking its advertising message up a notch with a 60-second commercial that sells its services with sizzle. The spot not only promotes its creative production and reach to potential advertisers, it also acts a news image spot that sells its news ratings performances as well.

The latest consumer research shows Americans are fatigued with hearing “we’re all in this together” from advertisers. They want a deal, touchless buying and deferred payments, not empathy.

Disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, advertisers canceled 15% to 25% of the third-quarter advertising time bought during the 2019-20 upfront, according to sources familiar with the situation. Ad sales executives said the cancellations were “not as bad as expected,” after the networks saw ad revenue declines of from 30% to 59% in April, according to Standard Media Index.

Ad demand fell 35% year-over-year in April, marking its lowest point since MediaPost and Standard Media Index began benchmarking the U.S. ad marketplace in 2012. Sequentially, total value of the U.S. Ad Market Tracker — an index representing total volume of advertising buys made in the U.S. — fell 30% from March, and 35% from February, which was the last “normal” month of U.S. ad demand prior to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on ad spending.