The syndication upfront, which concluded on Friday, appears to have matched last year's record $2.4 billion total, but it was only the top syndicated shows that showed major CPM increases.
    Syndication buyers say that the latest upfront saw CPM increases in the mid teens for hot properties like "Seinfeld," "Friends" and "Oprah," but that things were much slower for less popular offerings.
    "It was a stronger market than clients would like, but softer than people had anticipated," says Jon Mandel, co-managing director of MediaCom, the buying arm of Grey Advertising.
   Donna Salvatore, director of national and local broadcast for MediaVest, agrees.
    "Except for the top-tiered properties, where you had limited supply, there were either no increases or minimal increases in price," she reports.
    A spokeswoman at the Syndicated Network Television Association declined to predict what this year's total ad revenue take would be, saying that while the big deals have been concluded a significant amount of business remains to be transacted this week. "It's too soon to tell," she says.
    That said, it's already clear that this was a syndication upfront with a difference.
    "It was unusual to see everyone staying up and negotiating all night," says Ron Frederick, head of national broadcast at J. Walter Thompson, recalling the all-night bargaining session between buyers and syndicators last Thursday. 
   "In the past, you only saw that kind of thing happen in the cable and broadcast upfronts. But I don't think this was a case of a buyer stampede."
    Frederick says this year's syndication all-nighter instead seemed to have been seller-driven.
   "I think the sellers figured they should just push ahead and get their inventory sold, and people saw that the prices were reasonable, and they decided, hey, this isn't so bad, so let's make our buys."
    His conclusion: "The fast end to this upfront suggests that there's a lot of demand, but you're not seeing bull market numbers."
   By most accounts, this was a sharply tiered market, with a few key programs garnering CPM increases of 15 percent, a broader top tier of programs and getting closer to 10 percent increases, mid-tier programs getting 6-9 percent increases and lower-rated programs showing no change in price.
    Frederick says it's hard to tell from this syndication market what to expect in the much larger broadcast upfront, or in the cable upfront, which may begin as early as next week.
    "Syndicators don't tend to package their properties as much, so you get much wider divergences in prices," he says.
    Also, at least in JWT's case, Frederick says there was no dot.com money on the table.
   "So we have no hint as to whether there will be dot.com money in the cable or broadcast upfronts," he says.
    Last year, dot.com money was almost entirely absent from the white-hot cable and broadcast upfronts. Instead, it poured into the scatter market in the third, and especially the fourth quarter of 1999.
    For a while, it was assumed that this new category of advertising money would be a big factor in the 2000 upfronts, but recent turbulence in the stock market, especially among technology shares, makes this prospect less likely.

-Dave Lindorff covers televisions and research for Media Life.


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