The upfront is a week away and with statistics showing that viewership for the year is down by 2.5 million for ABC (DIS), CBS (CBS-A), NBC (GE) and Fox (NWS-A) from last year.
While there has been numerous reasons thrown around why this is the case, it actually misses the real point: the industry has been slow to respond. If you just take the Internet and nothing else, that has demanded a response much quicker than has happened.
The major problem has been the reality that people are now consuming media in different ways.
As Alan Wurtzel, chief research executive at NBC said, "People are not consuming less television, they're watching it in different ways, and the measurements haven't caught up."
While I do dispute his first comment that "people aren't consuming less television," his second comment is the point I'm talking about.
The way people choose to watch content has completely changed, and the ability to measure it has lagged far behind. That's why I said I dispute Wurtzel's comments. He simply can't assert that people aren't consuming less televison, because there is really no way of knowing if they really aren't at this time. The one thing that is known for sure is they're not consuming it as much as they used to by sitting in front of a television set at the appointed time of the show.
Ad agencies are saying they won't pay what they used to based upon this very problem. There is simply no way of knowing how much media is really being consumed and whether commercials are being watched. The upfront will probably be a disaster this year, even more than last year when some big companies even declined to participate.
There have been a few attempts at better measurements, but I think the overwhelming slow response is the based on fear and unwillingness to measure accurately in case numbers have really declined.
The advertising community is saying they want new measurements if the networks want to get top dollars again. I can't blame them. They can't pay for what isn't able to be measured. The industry needs to make measuring and metrics one of their key priorities this year, or they'll find the upfront becoming less relevant in a very short time. That's already happened with a number of key companies.
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