Tuesday January 24, 2006

Three Ways of Looking at the End of Television

Here are three headlines from two magazines—Adweek and Mediaweek—which are both owned by one company, VNU.


What’s strange is that all three refer to the exact same story. So which is it? Are upfront ad sales strong, wait-and-see, or likely to be down, but not by much? According to the actual story—the story to which all three headlines refer—“media agency executives acknowledge they do not see the broadcast network upfront growing much beyond last year’s approximate $9 billion, but they also don’t expect it to drop much below that.” In other words, “TV ad sales are flat,” which seems like a perfectly good headline.