Last year's upfront TV market broke sales records, pulling in $8.2 billion in ad dollars for the broadcast networks.
   But that was last year and a very different economy.
   The thinking these days, though the upfront is still months away, is that broadcast ad sales will be either flat or down from 2000.
   Merrill Lynch media analyst Jessica Reif Cohen has predicted that the 2001 upfront will actually be off from last year.
    This comes as little surprise to media buyers, since ad spending has been sluggish at best for nearly three quarters now.
    Still, buyers are a bit more optimistic than Wall Street that spending might pick up by the time the upfronts get underway in May, the once-a-year sellathon when about three-fourths of the coming year’s ad dollars are spent.
     With news of job cuts, after all, a stumbling stock market, the dot.com crash, and any number of other economic doom-and-gloom scenarios, most now consider flat growth a good thing.
    What's unclear is whether last year's prices will hold, with simply fewer advertisers coming into the market, or whether they will tumble in the face of slackened demand.
     "Inventory will be sold. It just depends at what price," says Jean Pool, president of operations at Mindshare, who predicts the upfront will be down.
    "It’s because the economy is showing signs of slowing down. There's volatility in the stock market, and there's a lack of activity in national and local media markets. The market will improve when the economy improves, when the Dow Jones goes up and stays up."
     Peter Gardiner, executive vice president and director of media services at Deutsch Inc., says: "It will be a return to sanity, or something near that.
   "We just went through an amazing time. Things are getting back to normal and normal feels down."
    Even if ad spending picks up this spring, though, most buyers contacted by Media Life say it’s highly unlikely the upfront will come anywhere near matching last year’s pace.
    In 2000, upfront spending in network TV rose by 14 percent to $8.2 billion, cable was up 28 percent to somewhere around $4.6-$4.8 billion, and syndication was relatively flat at about $2.4 billion.
    Bad news in the scatter market sort of had most buyers well prepared for a slow upfront.
   "The scatter market is deadly soft," says Dan Rank, managing partner, national broadcast, at OMD USA.
    "It's too early to predict if the upfront will be down. But another couple of months of this and I'll agree with [Reif Cohen.]"
    The scatter market, when ad dollars outside the upfronts are spent, slowed down in third quarter 2000 and came to a standstill in the fourth quarter. While the first quarter scatter market isn’t much better, most say that there are some signs that spending is picking up.
   But it’s also difficult to say what will happen since anything could change in the next four months.
    What is certain, though, is that if the upfront goes down this year, it won’t be the first time. In fact, the upfronts have fallen four times in the past decade, at least among the major broadcast networks, according to The Myers Report.
     In 1998 the upfront fell 3.1 percent. But most of the falls were concentrated in the recession of the early 1990s. It was down 4.5 percent in 1993, 19.5 percent in 1991, and 1.2 percent in 1990.
     And if this year’s upfront is flat, or even down, it won’t come as a great surprise.
    Earlier this year, Bob Coen, the chief forecaster at Universal McCann, predicted that ad dollars in network TV would increase by only 1 percent in the whole of 2001. The media investment bank Veronis, Suhler & Associates predicted the same.
     The outlook is better, they predicted, for cable TV and syndication. Coen forecast a 12.5 percent increase for cable and Veronis predicted a 13.4 percent increase.
    Although considerably higher than forecasts for network TV, based on percentage increases, cable forecasts are actually considerably lower than the 28 percent bump in ad dollars cable took in last year’s upfront.
    In 2000, cable TV had a record upfront, as did network TV.
    Syndication was forecast to increase 6.0 percent by Coen and 4.2 percent by Veronis. Outside of a few top-tier shows, the syndication upfront market was flat.

-Kevin Downey and Elizabeth White are staff writers for Media Life.

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