Selling Bloomberg TV advertising

Trevor Fellows, head of global media sales at Bloomberg Television, kept a running schedule of a recent work week for MediaWeek.

Here is an excerpt:

The office day begins with a review of our “upfront” activity. American broadcasters and cable networks negotiate roughly 80% of the following year’s ad deals in a few weeks in the early summer and while, as an international business news network, the majority of our business is negotiated on a calendar-year basis, the upfronts are still hugely important to us.

So far the signs are good – CPMs are growing at a healthy 7% and overall budgets are up. But a handful of clients are reporting that they’ll sit the upfronts out this year and wait to buy inventory later in the scatter market, hoping to snare lower pricing.

The rest of the day is spent focused on digital. We’ve made an enormous push to quadruple the production and consumption of Bloomberg’s online video by July and are well on track.

Two clients I meet that afternoon confide that they are looking to significantly increase their budget allocation for video. I’m happy to tell them that we not only have inventory, but also can help them produce assets.

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