By Stephen Battaglio, Inside.com
In another sign of trouble for the TV ad market, ABC is having to beat the bushes to find enough advertisers for its Oscars telecast on March 25.
ABC, which in good times sells out the Academy Awards in the fall, still has about 15 percent to 20 percent of the telecast's 52 30-second spots left to go, according to ad agency sources. "They're having some trouble," said one media executive at a major agency who was recently approached about buying time on the program. "But I think they will get there because things have to be really bad for a big event like the Oscars to be significantly unsold. I don't think we're there yet."
It is true that the broadcast is still nearly six weeks away and the network is likely to pull it out in the end. (Prices, ABC says, are holding firm, at about $1.4 million per spot, up from $1.3 million last year.) In January, CBS found itself in a similar predicament, with about 10 percent of the commercial inventory for Super Bowl XXXV unsold three weeks before airtime. CBS was eventually able to sell out, but its sales staff had to hustle to get there.
ABC faces a particularly tough task. Not only is the network scrambling to find advertisers who will pay high prices at a time when they are cutting back on spending, but also ABC's deal with the Academy has a number of restrictions as to who can run spots on the program. There are no ads allowed from movie studios, for instance, and a number of other product categories -- such as feminine hygiene -- are off limits since the Academy wants to give its event a glitzy sheen.
Another challenge is preserving the sponsorships that have long enabled ABC to sell multiple spots on the telecast even though it's the second-richest ad buy on television, after the Super Bowl. Advertisers who buy a half dozen or more spots on the Academy Awards have been given exclusivity in their product categories. Incumbent sponsors are given first crack at the following year's show and turnover is rare. The most notable recent change was Pepsi-Cola taking over the soft-drink category over from Coca-Cola.
This past year, Revlon, long one of the biggest sponsors of the Academy Awards with at least eight spots on the telecast, pulled out of the program because of its own financial problems. For years, it was the only cosmetics and hair care advertiser on a broadcast that has become known as "the Super Bowl for Women" because of its enormous female audience (out of the 46 million who watched last year's broadcast, 14 million were women aged 18-49).
But the stalled economy, in which advertisers have pulled back on network spending, has made it tough for ABC to make up that loss. "Right now the big ticket items aren't going as quickly as they did a few years ago," says Tim Spengler of the media buying firm Initiative Media. "Other times you always had backup orders in the house."
But not this time. Mike Shaw, president of sales and marketing at ABC, says Revlon's departure is the main reason the 2001 telecast isn't sold out yet.
Shaw says he trying to keep the sponsorship package intact so that the network can depend on it for years to come. "We're trying to maintain a consistency and look that has been there for years," he says. "We're trying to establish something an advertiser will use every year as part of their marketing strategy. That's really our goal."
But there aren't a lot of advertisers who are willing to cough up millions of dollars for a single program. ABC may have to carve up the category so that it can go to a few different advertisers to pick up the slack.
� 2001 Inside.com