United States: A radical change in the sale of programs to advertising agencies

Television pre-sale as we know it today is reaching its end. An this time it is true. In view of a 24 billion dollar television advertising market, the question is about commercial ratings and whether commercial prices should be based on commercial ratings instead of basing on program ratings. Everything will change in 2008. A commercial rating system and a delayed viewing system will arise. They are new ways of measuring audiences that go beyond the ratings scored at the time the program is being broadcasted. "Buyers are interested in delayed viewing when the commercial is in fact seen, and not when its deleted from a device such as TiVo," says John Spiropoulos, VP and Director to MediaVest's research team. Sales agents maintain that delayed viewing is all right but it must base on commercial ratings by the minute, and they remark that agencies using program ratings would be ridiculous. Of course networks pay attention to changes because commercial rating strategy is risky. Commercial ratings are around 10% lower than program ratings, which means that buyers could negotiate lower prices. "If we work with commercial ratings and we only get rating credit when somebody watches the commercial, that should end with the discussion about who watched the commercial and when," states Alan Wurtzel, Media Research and Development President at NBC Universal. "It would give us credit for getting audiences beyond the live period, which is becoming less important in the television business." The advantage advertisers see is that networks will make more efforts to keep viewers during the commercial and advertising will win as part of the pro gram. Of course not everybody is happy with the rising pre-sale model. Some buyers and sellers have debated on the fact that there should be specific commercial ratings based on the information by the Nielsen second. The problem is that Nielsen does not measure audiences by the second, and doing it would take many years and much money.

Hispanic networks enter the market
Buyers estimate higher prices for the U$S 1.6 billion pre-sale carried out last spring. Tariffs will rise since Nielsen's new information leaves Hispanic and US networks on equal terms for the first time and it will urge Hispanic networks to demand prices similar to the ones paid to English spoken stations. "This will give Hispanic networks more visibility ," remarks Bob Turner, Sales President to Azteca America network.