The ad revenues still go up because nothing dependably delivers the eyeballs that successful series do.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
As the ratings go up, so does advertising revenue.
Money is being wasted on adverts that go right over a consumer's head. They may win awards at Cannes, but they lose at the cash register.
If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn't have to advertise them.
Upfronts are all about ad sales.
The funny thing about advertising is that it's not a zero-sum game... Historically, in the digital ad world, pie has gotten larger and it's possible for everyone to win, and it's perfectly possible that will continue to be true for quite some time.
When you invest in high-quality brands, it pays off with high-quality audiences and, ultimately, high-quality advertising rates.
It's almost as if creativity is dead. The visual power of advertising was everywhere - now it's basically gone.
So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office.
The Internet is king. Newspapers are dead or dying. Magazines are shrinking every day. Ad budgets are being cut. The bottom line is now the only line in advertising.
Nobody's profitable at this moment, because recession is on; advertising dollars are down, and expenses are way up. So that kind of belies the situation that you would expect, because the ratings are way up everywhere.