advertising

The Detroit 3 automakers and their suppliers began restarting assembly lines on Monday after a two-month coronavirus lockdown in a slow revival of a sector that employs nearly 1 million people in the United States. The companies said there were no issues with absenteeism as the plants reopened. Staffing levels met or exceeded original expectations, the UAW said.

In the first part of its virtual upfront presentation Monday, the media company employed its on-air talent to make the point that the merger that combined Viacom with CBS late last year made the company “simply stronger” together.

A month and a half into the second quarter, major TV station groups are witnessing sharp advertising declines of around 35% to 40% so far due to COVID-19, according to recent earnings calls with analysts.

TV viewing is up, advertising revenues are down, but no layoffs — those are some takeaways from interviews with general managers Debbie Bush, WXIX; Branden Frantz, WLWT; Jeff Brogan, WCPO; and Jon Lawhead, WKRC-WSTR.

He joins from iHeartMedia in Portland, Ore., to oversee sales at the Scripps ABC affiliates in Boise-Nampa and Twin Falls, Idaho.

Ad spending during this year’s upfront network TV marketplace will decline 33% from last year’s, if one occurs at all. Those are the findings of the most recent wave of COVID-19 pandemic tracking studies conducted by Advertiser Perceptions.

Big advertisers from General Motors to PepsiCo to General Mills are seeking to walk back spending commitments they made to broadcast and cable networks, a dynamic that is testing the industry’s five-decade-old way of doing business.

In another sign of weakening ad demand — and a troubling indicator for 2020-21 upfront network TV ad negotiations — the delta between upfront and scatter ad prices narrowed to its closest point in recent memory in April, according to a Media Daily News analysis of data from SQAD.

The Comcast-backed company on Monday reiterated its interest in having advertisers give consideration to a series of new initiatives it has unveiled in recent months that call for buying ads across different video venues and reducing the number of commercials that appear within any individual piece of content. “We are changing our business so we can make your business stronger,” said Linda Yaccarino, chairman of advertising sales and partnerships for NBCUniversal, during a streaming-video presentation held for media buyers, analysts and press.

NBCUniversal unveiled plans for a new advertising venture with its Comcast sibling Sky, a “creativity summit” over the summer and other initiatives during a “state of the marketplace conversation” on Monday. The online event was held on the day the company had planned to host its annual upfront presentation at Radio City Music Hall.

Economic uncertainty and the lack of live sports paint a grim picture for second quarter and beyond.

TV advertisers are poised to make massive third-quarter option cuts to their network TV commitments of around 25% due to COVID-19 issues — estimated to be in the range of $2.5 billion to $2.7 billion — according to media-buying executives. This would be much higher than the 3% to 4% average pullback that typically occurs in a specific quarter where cancellations are permitted.

The Home of the Whopper, Verizon and Amazon are among the relative few that haven’t been afraid to run ads near coverage of the coronavirus.

In-person glitzy events were scrapped because of the pandemic, but that won’t stop the sales pitches.

A week before ViacomCBS would normally hold its annual upfronts bash at New York’s Carnegie Hall—which, like every other in-person upfronts week event, was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic—the company has set a new strategy for its first upfront since CBS and Viacom merged last December. Instead of its May 13 event, the company will hold a pair of virtual presentations over two days—on Monday, May 18 and Tuesday, May 19—said Jo Ann Ross, president and chief advertising revenue officer of domestic ad sales at ViacomCBS, to clients and agencies in a letter this afternoon.

Sad piano chords, somber shots of empty streets and close-ups of people staring out their windows. So prevalent were coronavirus-themed ads that followed a similar template just a few weeks ago, they were parodied in a YouTube compilation video: Every COVID-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same. While the ads were meant to convey solidarity with those sacrificing and suffering, advertisers are finally lightening up.

Adjusting along with the rest of the industry to COVID-19, NBCUniversal has scheduled a virtual event for advertisers on May 11, the same date it had previously planned for its annual upfront. Dubbed a “One Industry Update,” the refashioned event will be a videoconference featuring executive comments as well as a “state of the marketplace conversation” with a Q&A period. The company officially canceled its upfront in mid-March, as TV networks regrouped as soon as it became clear that the pandemic had arrived.

The local broadcast TV trade association’s annual event goes virtual on Oct. 1

Demand for advertising space during the NFL draft broadcast has reached unprecedented levels due to the growing popularity of the event and a lack of other live sports opportunities, Disney Advertising Sales said this week. The COVID-19 pandemic has wiped out most of the U.S. sports calendar, but the three-day draft will go forward in a “virtual” format, with players participating from home, and be broadcast on Disney-owned ABC and ESPN starting on Thursday.

March, the first month to feel the effects of COVID-19 on the ad economy, saw the U.S. ad marketplace decline 10.8% from March 2019, according to results of the U.S. Ad Market Tracker, a collaboration of MediaPost and Standard Media Index.

Many advertisers are pressing for negotiations to take place in September and October, according to eight executives with knowledge of recent discussions, when the networks will have a better idea of their new programming lineups and marketers may have enough knowledge of how their businesses are faring to discuss the purchase of ad time in 2021. If that were to happen, it would undermine the flow of ad dollars to the networks in the fourth quarter, typically a period of robust spending around holiday shopping and NFL football games. Other sponsors are ready to buy ad time now.

The shutdown of sports due to the coronavirus pandemic is propelling a historic decline in U.S. TV advertising: Sales could be down by as much as $10 billion in the first half of the year. The projection, released Monday in a new report by digital research firm EMarketer, illustrates the financial pain facing U.S. broadcasters, particularly ESPN, CBS, Turner and NBC, which rely on live sports to boost their ratings and advertising hauls.

A couple of months into the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic, consumers, advertisers and media outlets are adjusting to new norms, and as far as the advertising marketplace is concerned, it means increasingly flexible terms and ways of doing business.

AMC Networks has opened up an online destination for its advertising business, hoping to connect with clients now that face-to-face meetings are off-limits for the time being.

CNN chief Jeff Zucker has urged editors and producers at the network not to shift focus from coronavirus news updates despite weeks of wall-to-wall coverage of the pandemic.

Linear TV advertising revenues are down 27% because of the Coronavirus crisis according to ad sales executives surveyed by the Internet Advertising Bureau. The executives expect that the crisis will have its biggest impact on advertising between March and June, and they said that declines in digital spending were smaller than those in traditional media.

NBCUniversal said Monday that Capital One, L’Oreal, Molson Coors, Subaru and Verizon have signed up as launch sponsors for the new streaming service Peacock when it debuts this week. Peacock hits nationwide on Wednesday, April 15, free for customers of parent company Comcast, and three months later for everyone else with a price range from free to $10 a month.

One month ago, the annual May upfronts week was upended as all the major media companies canceled their presentations en masse and switched to virtual events amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The TV advertising tradition is now in the process of dissolving entirely this year, as most presenters have decided to delay their virtual events for several weeks, or rethink their plans entirely.

It’s been assumed by most media analysts, media buyer and ad executive surveys, and a variety of pundits that the Big Digital platforms would be first to feel the impact of the ad recession, because digital media is generally bought on more of a “scatter” basis and tied to fewer long-term commitments. Well now there’s market-based proof. As of data available Tuesday, Facebook’s worldwide CPM fell an all-time low of $1.95, according to data analyzed by Boston-based agency Gupta Media.

Major TV advertising categories have seen an 8% decline in 30-second commercials on top TV networks for the week of March 23-29 versus the same week a year ago, according to Kantar, due to cutbacks resulting from COVID-19. While many national TV advertising categories such as restaurants, travel/tourism, and retail have declined as expected due to COVID-19, other categories including automotive, insurance and household products have been climbing.

Two new commercials address the challenges sports fans — and ESPN itself — are facing amid the coronavirus shutdown.

This week, several Fox Sports execs participated in hour-long video conferences with six key ad agency partners, including GroupM, Omnicom and IPG. During the Zoom chats, the execs discussed the conversations they’ve been having with the leagues, shared various scenarios for when sports could return and fielded questions about the sports marketplace.

Blank billboards and canceled online ads signal an industry in crisis as the coronavirus spreads. “There are things happening that we’ve never seen before,” one marketing executive says.