Will a sex romp featuring young, single friends in Los Angeles lead NBC to ratings victory next season? Can the runaway success of “American Idol” on Fox continue next year? Or will former bad boy Charlie Sheen bring in scores of younger viewers for CBS? After unveiling the crucial fall season this week, network television executives are hoping to score hefty price increases in the amount of money they charge the country’s biggest marketers for commercial time next season.
THE MAJOR TV networks presented their fall prime-time schedules to Madison Avenue this week, with a line-up heavy on celebrity-driven comedies and crime dramas, but few new reality shows.
Negotiations kicked-off Friday between advertising executives and TV executives over how much money advertisers will pay for commercials in prime-time next year.
TV audience reaction to the slate of new shows presented in New York by the broadcast networks CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, WB and UPN is months away, but the deals — expected to be mostly wrapped-up by the end of next week — could bring in as much as an 8 percent increase in ad sales over last year’s record-breaking $8.1 billion for the six major networks, according to media buying executives and TV analysts.
The stakes are huge. The networks offer as much as 85 pecent of all available prime-time commercial time during the upfront negotiations, so they try to lock in big price jumps. Major corporate advertisers, under pressure to maintain market share in a struggling economy, hope to lock in the lowest price possible for their ad campaigns for the next year.
Typically, anywhere from 60 percent to 70 percent of new shows fail. But judging from the solid, if creatively familiar, line-up of new shows, the TV networks will have the edge, TV analysts say.
“From a negotiating standpoint, the TV networks are in their strongest postion in years,” said media analyst Jack Myers who has been surveying agency media buyers about the upfront deals. “The networks have been able to staunch the tide of audience erosion [to cable networks] and they have a confidence they can fill holes in the program schedule with reality programming.”
Beyond the promising fall schedule, overall advertiser demand for commercials in prime-time remains high.
“Demand in prime-time continues to be very strong,” said Rich Hamilton, chief executive of ZenithOptimedia Group, a major media-services agency. “As the war approached there were fears that the bottom was going to drop out, but the ad economy has been quite resilient.”
According to Meyers, CBS, which won the largest total viewing audience in the 2002-2003 TV season, could see commercial gains of 20 percent for its fall schedule while NBC—which boasts the most viewers 18-49 years-old, the age group most coveted by advertisers—could push for increases of 16 percent ahead of last year.
But a a media executive at a top New York agency called the double-digit percentage jumps “completely unrealistic.”
The networks face different challenges and offered varying strategies in their line-ups.
For example, ABC, which trails the Big Four networks in ratings, is relying on a load of family-oriented comedies to score a comeback (see chart). Fox, coming off the huge success of the reality shows “American Idol” and “Joe Millionaire” hopes to push past the youthful demographic champ NBC with a return to its “Melrose Place” heyday, offering a controversial drama about the adult film industry called “Skin,” produced by Hollywood hotshot Jerry Bruckheimer, and a 20-something soap opera, “The O.C.”
NBC is looking to the big events of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and the final episode of its phenomenal hit comedy “Friends” to build momentum for its ad revenues. The network is reportedly charging advertisers a Super Bowl-sized $2 million for a 30-second commercial for the last airing of “Friends.” In the hopes of maintaining its dominance on Thursday nights, NBC is launching “Coupling,” a sexually frank British comedy that has been reworked and recast for American viewers.
Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Entertainment, stressed the network’s “quality” and “stability.”
CBS, riding on the powerful momentum of the crime drama “CSI” and the reality show “Survivor,” is trotting several new crime dramas and a comedy “Two and a Half Men,” starring Charlie Sheen.
If early reaction from agency executives is any indication, next season looks promising.
“There were a lot of good shows,” said Roy Rothstein, vice president of national broadcast research at ZenithOptimedia Group, a leading media-services agency in New York. “There’s nothing that definitely said a hit, but there was a lot that was encouraging.”
Critics argue that the lack of sure-fire, breakout hits could make the ad negotiations tougher than the networks expect.
“There’s very little [that] jumped out at me,” said J. Max Robins, columnist for “TV Guide” magazine. “There’s a lot of money at stake and with the economy the way it is, everybody’s playing it safe.”
Others countered that the lack of new reality programming made the familiar formula of family comedies and crime dramas seem conversative in comparison. In their presentations the network program chiefs distanced their networks from the reality craze of the past few months. Mainstream advertisers have resisted placing their commercials in many reality shows.
For example, ABC is bringing back “The Bachelor” (the “most upscale reality show on TV, boasted ABC entertainment president Susan Lyne and “Extreme Makeover,” but dumped the jiggle-fest “Are You Hot?”, a show that Lyne admitted caused the fourth-placed, Walt Disney-owned network embarassment.
The reality blitz isn’t over, however, insists Wayne Friedman, Los Angeles bureau chief of the trade publication Advertising Age.
“As soon as any of these shows fail, the networks will almost assuredly put in hefty amounts of reality shows as a band-aid on problems in the schedule,” he said.