If you want to see the latest fire sale, just turn on your TV.
The nation’s big media companies are facing significant headwinds in the industry’s current “upfront” market, when TV networks try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory for their next cycle of programming. Advertisers are pulling back on the amount of money they wish to commit to TV overall, according to five executives with knowledge of recent discussions, and they are in many cases pressing the networks for significant “rollbacks” on rates, particularly for streaming inventory that is supposed to represent the future of the medium.
Advertisers have been able to snatch up streaming ad inventory and linear commercial time in deals that call for what is known as “rollbacks,” or reductions in CPMs, a measure of the cost of reaching 1,000 viewers that is central in these annual discussions between TV networks and Madison Avenue. Rollbacks for streaming CPMs have come in at as much as a decrease in the double-digit percentage range, according to these people, while CPMs for some traditional broadcast and cable are off by as much as 4%. Linear TV is commanding some CPM increases, these people say, for sports and tentpole events, that may go up as much as in the mid-single-percentage range.
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