Las Vegas should have a line on the upfront market, particularly this year. What’s the over/under on total dollars? What are the odds the networks will hold back big chunks of inventory? How quickly will everything be decided?

Every year the networks’ sales executives and the media buyers talk their books. Fair enough. But this year, many seem to be shrugging their shoulders when asked about the upfront market.

On the one hand, maybe advertisers are ready to open up their checkbooks; after all, they don’t want their brands left out if the economy rallies and consumers start to spend again. On the other hand, do they really believe the economy is about to rally and consumers are about to start spending again?

NBC Universal’s ad sales team didn’t shed a whole lot of light on matters at Monday’s presentation of the new network lineup, which features six new shows. (Really, there should be Vegas odds on how fast some of these shows will be yanked; that seems to be the way of the business these days).

Here’s what Michael Pilot, President, NBCU Sales & Marketing, said when asked by a reporter about the upfront market:

We’ve been in this recession for a year and a half now. Last year’s upfront was exceptionally strong both in terms of volume and price.

After the craziness of the fall, we saw some pullback in second quarter options. But then the second quarter scatter market turned out to be healthier than we had anticipated.

We’re feeling anecdotally that advertisers are leaning forward getting ready to move. If you think about the recovery sometime later this year or early 2010, we’re starting to see advertisers lean into that and get ready for that. But I’m not ready to call it one way or another. I think it’s going to be interesting.

Marianne Gambelli, President, NBC Network Ad Sales, chimed in with the following:

Clients are more focused than they’ve ever been on what’s the right decision and what’s the right mix. Obviously, flexibility is key.

But they also are looking at making commitments when things are more favorable. As this economy recovers, scatter has been known to spike quite high and clients are concerned about that.

I think everybody is trying to get on board to get the right mix. You can’t predict it. It’s too soon to tell. But the conversations are much deeper than they have been before.

(Photo: Reuters)

News broke this week that Anheuser-Busch has told NBC that the brewer will spend only about half as much on advertising packages during the upcoming 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games and 2012 Summer Games in London, compared to previous years.

Over at 30 Rock, they aren’t too worried about it. NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker, who won wide praise for the company’s coverage of the Beijing Olympics, feels that there are plenty of advertisers ready to step in and replace any company that wants or needs to cut their spending on the sporting event.

When we asked Zucker about the Anheuser-Busch situation, he said, “The interest in the Olympics — because it’s such a unique event — has been extraordinary. Where certain companies decide it doesn’t work for them anymore, it provides an opportunity for their competitors to come in. That works out just fine for us.”

As for Hulu, which Disney joined yesterday, Zucker said he’s very happy with its progress, calling it the “preeminent site” for online videos. Even so, he’s not about to cannibalize either NBC Universal’s own TV networks or its website by handing over content like the Olympics. “I think the Olympics is something that’s pretty proprietary and is unique to our owned properties.

Oh, and don’t expect NBC Universal to become a big buyer of media properties even as valuations for some web properties have sunk like a stone. “We’ve been very proud of what we’ve grown organically here. Between Hulu and NBC.com and CNBC.com and MSNBC.com. Our digital strategy now is to enhance what we’ve grown here in the last 18 months.” In other words, focus on organic growth rather than acquisitions.

Keep an eye on:

• Don’t sweat the recession and depressed DVD sales, because Hollywood might be headed for its best year ever at the box office (WSJ.com)

• Is the Boston Globe about to be closed? It’s deadline day for the New York Times Co. (Reuters)

• You could soon see prices dipping on some of the most popular Macs — a big change for Apple (AppleInsider)

(Photo: Reuters)

Bravo unveiled its new TV lineup at its upfront breakfast on Tuesday– and it’s chock full of more of those grating characters and train-wreck scenarios that have proved so successful for the cable network.

At the breakfast in Manhattan’s Russian Tea Room, executives played down the recession, played up a recent New York Times article and announced that a cable network known for its unscripted shows is developing two scripted dramas, “Blueprint” and “30 under 30.”

So how is Bravo doing? Sales executive Susan Malfa said Bravo accounted for 14 of the top 15 product placements last year, added 100 new advertisers, and posted its best sales year to date. She and other Bravo executives then unveiled the cable network’s largest slate of returning shows, new shows and programs in development.

Here is Bravo’s description of those new shows and development deals:

• AMERICAN ARTIST:  American Artist will bring together 12 aspiring artists to compete for a gallery show, a cash prize and a sponsored national tour.

• DESIGN SIXX: Husband and wife design team Cortney and Robert Novogratz have made it their business to seek out abandoned buildings across Manhattan. Their company, Sixx Design, has established an international reputation by taking those buildings and transforming them into multimillion-dollar living spaces.

• KELL ON EARTH: Bravo takes a no-holds-barred look into the life of one of America’s most legitimate tastemakers as she balances running her wildly successful fashion PR company, People’s Revolution, with being a single mother and one of New York’s most notable women about town.

• LAUNCH MY LINE: Bravo’s newest fashion competition series, features 10 established fashion designers paired with pop culture notables, who are highly regarded in their own field of expertise, but have always dreamed of having their own line.

• ERIC B.: Vivacious and wildly creative, Eric Buterbaugh is the florist of choice for celebrities, power brokers and anyone else compelled to have one of the world’s most exclusive floral designers conceptualizing and executing the look of their special events.

• JACKIE’S GYM TAKEOVER: She’s used to completely making over people’s bodies and minds – now Jackie Warner is making over businesses.  As a fitness expert, gym owner and entrepreneur Warner will use her experience to whip struggling gyms back into shape.

• LAURA BENNETT: From the looks of the perennially put together Laura Bennett, one would never know what insanity brews in her downtown loft filled with a husband, a band of misbehaving pets, and a small army of children under the age of 12.

• SECRET LIFE OF SUPERMODELS: Even the world’s most beautiful women have unusual passions, complicated relationships and every day problems.

• SOCIAL HEIGHTS: Bravo’s newest docu-series, “Social Heights,” follows a close group of Manhattan friends as they try to stake their claim to social prominence.

(Photo: The cast of the fourth season of “Top Chef” in an undated image courtesy of Bravo)

The big story in the media for the rest of the week is the annual National Cable Telecommunications Association Show, or “the cable show,” as its commonly called.

This year’s primary topic looks like it will be how the big, traditional operators in the business will adapt to an age when the Internet is giving people more options to watch shows, and not always in a way that feeds the bank.

Here is our own take on the show from the Reuters wire:

Both sets of companies will be brainstorming on how to cope with or benefit from disintermediation: consumers can now watch decent-quality video online whenever they want, and often for free.

“Last year, cable companies were in a more probelgradetectionist mode but now they’re facing up to the inevitable trend, because online video is really here to stay,” said Tuna Amobi, equity analyst at Standard & Poor’s.

Executives will also have the economy on their minds.

“The current recession has cut into consumer spending for household TV and telecommunications, while also causing most marketers to reduce their advertising budgets,” said Collins Stewart analyst Thomas Eagan.

Longer term, the industry hopes to forge new tie-ups to capitalize on the online trend.

Broadcasting & Cable approaches the same topic, but with the requisite “it’s still early days” comment:

But with online viewing still amounting to a tiny fraction of actual viewing (not to mention revenue), the debate over a viable business model may be a lot louder than it needs to be. Cable networks, however, have to work with their pipelines to protect everyone’s interests.

“We’re constantly looking at evolving our economic models on our shows to ensure that we’re protected well into the future,” says Andrea Wong, president and CEO of Lifetime Networks. “I don’t think anyone has the magic answer yet. I think that we’re all trying to experiment and find new ways to do business together. I think we have to.”

Those last two sentences could have been taken from a newspaper executive.

MarketWatch reports on operators freaked out about the economic recession causing people to simply give up cable and do something else with their time.

Since last May’s Cable Show in New Orleans, the price of cable stocks have dropped by an average of 31%, with most of the declines coming after the September collapse of Lehman Brothers that triggered a worldwide financial meltdown.

The phenomenon of “cord-cutting” has been a concern of some cable executives, most notably Time Warner Cable (TWC) Chairman Glenn Britt, who has voiced his belief that the wide availability of free, ad-supported television shows online through sites like Hulu, Veoh and others has made it feasible to stop paying for cable or satellite service.

Keep an eye on:

• Speaking of cable and the Internet, Google’s YouTube signed a deal with Disney to offer ABC and ESPN clips on its Web video service. Disney might also put full-length shows on the Hulu joint venture betwen News Corp and NBC Universal. This is something that the cable guys mentioned above are watching with some alarm because, as we noted above, this stuff would be free, and no one wants to wind up like newspapers who gave away the store online for the past decade. (PaidContent and The Wall Street Journal)
• Speaking of newspapers, the Journal and The New York Times had the same bright idea: Profiles of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News on their first day of delivering the news without a print newspaper. It was either genius, dumb luck or just plain dumb, depending on how you lookat it; big events in the collapsing auto industry, not to mention some other noteworthy stuff, made for a huge news day. That either spurred online interest or made readers scream because they had no paper to read about it. (The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times)
• More from newspaper land: The New York Times cut its staff and sought pay concessions on Thursday. Now the axe is swinging at the Times-owned Boston Globe. Thirty buyouts, 20 layoffs. (Boston Business Journal)
  Also, online ad growth “screeches to a halt.” Sigh. (Silicon Alley Insider)
• Google commits $100 million to its venture capital fund, according to unnamed sources, like it’s some kind of scandal. Google also names folks who will run it, fortunately showing its confidence in them by saying so on the record. (The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times)
• Google Maps is good at catching cheating husbands for free, if you can believe this report. (The Sun)

(Photo: Reuters)

Twitter is now free for all, but it may not be for much longer. According to co-founder Biz Stone, the micro-blogging site plans to offer commercial accounts for businesses to pay a fee to receive an enhanced version of Twitter starting some time this year.

The move is part of Twitter’s accelerated plan to start seeking revenue in 2009, despite the economic downturn and cutbacks in advertising spending online. The company recently closed a round of venture capital financing pegged at $35 million by media reports, following two earlier funding rounds totaling $20 million. The recent round valued Twitter at $255 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Stone says:

We think there will be opportunities to provide services to commercial entities that help them get even more value out of Twitter. If these services are valuable to companies, we think they may want to pay for them.

We have lots of time for experimentation with regard to revenue generation, so we’ll probably be trying a few different things this year.

Last year, the company turned down a $500 million acquisition offer by Facebook, sources have told Reuters. And some observers think Google might have its eye on Twitter.

Now plenty of people have found fun ways to use Twitter’s 140-character text messages, but this one caught our eye: Researchers at New York University have come up with a way to let thirsty plants Twitter for water. The device called Botanicalls is made of soil-moisture sensors connected to a circuit board. It determines whether moisture levels are too low, or too high, and then transmits a wireless signal to Twitter. Tweets can be personalized to suit the owner, or the type of plant, co-creator Kate Hartman told Reuters.

There’s always a basic “I’m thirsty, could you please water me” message. But they also accelerate in terms of need, so there’s an urgent message: “I’m desperately thirsty, please water me.

Intrigued? Check out Hartman’s ‘Pothos‘ plant, which has more than 2,500 followers.

Keep an eye on:

• NBC and its partners are close to naming a new chief executive for the Weather Channel: Bill Bolster, a former chief executive at CNBC (New York Times)
• Over 90 percent of British iPhone users access mobile media, including websites, e-mails, social networks and games, far higher than users of other mobile phones, research showed (Reuters)
• Nintendo has shipped more than 50 million units of its Wii game console since its launch three years ago (Reuters)
• iTunes will roll out its variable pricing scheme for hit singles and selected classics on April 7. Apple previously said songs will be priced at 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29 (Los Angeles Times)

(Screengrab taken March 26, 2009)

French conglomerate Vivendi this week joined a long list of media and entertainment companies that have been forced to write down their book values after suffering a sharp drop in advertising revenue and tumbling share prices, with no immediate turnaround visible on the horizon.

But what caught our eye was a new valuation for NBC Universal implied in the writedown. Vivendi said in its results report that it took 1.503 billion euros off the value of its 20 percent stake in NBC Universal. It didn’t say what the stake was now worth, so we asked our colleague in Paris to check with the company. A Vivendi spokesman said it wrote the NBC stake to around $6 billion in 2008 accounts. By our math, that would value NBC Universal at about $30 billion.

So is NBCU worth $30 billion? What would the TV network, movie studio and theme park owner fetch on the market if GE/Vivendi ever put it up for sale? We’ll leave you to decide, but here’s a graph of the financials for some of the biggest U.S. media companies for comparison.

(Note: According to GE, revenue from NBC Universal was $4.4 billion in the December quarter and segment profit was $865 million)

So does all this mean General Electric is under pressure to write down its stake in NBC Universal? After all, Time Warner took a whopping $25 billion charge and News Corp wrote off some $8.4 billion in assets.

GE spokesman Russell Wilkerson told Reuters there was “no need for a writedown.” GE had $18.97 billion worth of NBC-related goodwill on its books at the end of 2008, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Vivendi’s valuation puts a price tag of $24 billion on GE’s 80 percent stake in NBC.

(Photo: The GE building at 30 Rockefeller Center where NBC headquarters is located in New York on 14 Oct 2001/REUTERS)

Google just keeps on truckin’. The Internet powerhouse posted results yesterday that show advertisers haven’t completely cut their spending — at least not on search.

Excluding one-time charges, profit was $5.10 a share, beating the average analyst forecast of $4.95 according to Reuters Estimates.

Revenue rose 18 percent to $5.7 billion — a shadow of the 50 percent growth levels that Google used to enjoy, but considered by analysts to be a robust performance given the weak economy and corporate cutbacks in advertising spending.

But CEO Eric Schmidt also took pains to keep investors, analysts and the press realistic about the world today: “Now clearly we’re in a worldwide recession as everybody knows, rising unemployment, foreclosures, that sort of thing,” he said on a conference call. “But we don’t know how long this period will last. We obviously hope it will be short.”

Shares of Google were up more than 4 percent in early trade, and analysts offered mostly upbeat responses to the earnings despite Schmidt’s caution.

“We would be buyers of Google shares coming out of 4Q earnings. Macro risks remain, but we think Google grows high-single digits in ‘09 & is among the best-positioned companies to weather the storm,” wrote Barclays analyst Douglas Anmuth, who reiterated an “overweight” rating on the company and set a price target of $460.

You just know this sort of talk drives Steve Ballmer bonkers.

Keep an eye on:

• Tribune Co selected Tom Ricketts, the head of a Chicago investment bank, as the lead bidder for the Chicago Cubs baseball team, after receiving support from the bankrupt media firm’s creditors (Reuters)
• General Electric Co reported a 44 percent drop in quarterly profit, while media division NBC Universal’s profit declined 6 percent as strong cable earnings were offset by declines in the local stations (Reuters)
• The New York Times is in advanced negotiations to sell a substantial portion of its 52-story headquarters building on Eighth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan to W. P. Carey & Company (NY Times)

(Photo: Reuters)

How odd is it that perhaps the most exciting story in network television is not about “Lost”, “Fringe” or some other edgy, expensive small-screen phenomenon, but instead, about a veteran night time talk show host moving to prime time?

According to reports, NBC is set to announce today that Jay Leno, who relinquishes his “Tonight Show” gig next May, will get a new show at 10 p.m. each night “in a format similar to “The Tonight Show.”

This news comes as last-place NBC tries to cut costs during the economic slowdown. It wants to streamline creative decision-making. I suppose you can’t streamline it any more than putting the same gab-fest on every weekday night to compete with everything from legal and espionage yarns to hospital dramas and time travel shows.

But don’t sneeze at the idea: Jay Leno is a proven entertainer with a solid audience– more than can be said for sidelined shows like “My Own Worst Enemy” and “Lipstick Jungle.” Even better — the move may save NBC $200 million annually.

So what’s next? Three-nights-a-week of some kind of variety or singing competition? Wait, oh… nevermind.

Keep an eye on:

• Has the growth of “Guitar Hero” peaked? (Edge-Online)
• Myspace has opened its platform to third-party developers, a move that helps to build web services on its social network
• It may be tough for NBC to unload its remains Super Bowl ad slots. (AdAge)

(Photo: Reuters)

Dimming prospects for an auto bailout spell trouble for the folks on Madison Avenue. Already, sources say that General Motors is taking a hard look at all of its advertising contracts – held by Interpublic and Publicis — to see if they should be renewed as they come up.

That’s a pretty big deal, given that GM forked out about $1 billion in ad spending for the first six months of the year. And overall, domestic automakers spent about $2.8 billion on advertising in the first six months of 2008, down 17 percent, but was still one of the 10 largest U.S. advertising categories.

If you want to know how dependent the advertising industry is on the auto industry, take a look at Advertising Age, which has a in-depth feature on it. The upshot:

If one or more of Detroit’s carmakers goes away, gets smaller or goes into bankruptcy, “all media companies need to be concerned and there will be an impact on agencies, which derive a substantial amount of their income from [Detroit],” warned Bob Liodice, president-CEO of the Association of National Advertisers. “These are substantial, heavyweight players. You’ve got some of the largest marketing spending companies in America.”

Keep an eye on:

• Ziff Davis Media announced Wednesday that it was ending print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, and would take the title online only (NY Times)
• Ben Silverman, the co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal Television Studio, has joined the board of the Peacock Equity Fund (The Hollywood Reporter)
• Google is shutting down Lively, the virtual world that could be embedded into other Websites (TechCrunch)
• Publicis hopes it can beat the advertising market in terms of revenue growth and margin in 2009 (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

Want proof that Philadelphia is still the City of Brotherly Love? NBC and Fox are joining forces in Philadephia to gather and distribute video coverage to other local media.

The service will be managed by Fox Television Stations and NBC Local Media, which hope to roll the program out to other markets. For now, local media in Philadelphia will have access to the news service’s video footage — presumably at a cost.

Here’s how the companies described it in a release:

NBC Local Media and the Fox Television Stations will provide newsgathering and transmission resources to the local news service: including a helicopter, personnel and equipment, while also maintaining their own separate capabilities. The news service management will independently identify the stories to be covered each day and make arrangements to gather and transmit the video back to each of the stations. The stations will each decide how the material is to be used in their own newscasts, using their own writing and editorial voice. All employees involved in the local news service will remain part of their respective companies.

(Reuters photo of Rocky statue in Philadephia)