Cathy Applefeld Olson

Negotiations between networks, advertisers and the agencies that guide their marketing strategies are at a crosshairs like no other year in the history of television. Fueled by pent-up exasperation on Madison Avenue, and accelerated by Covid-19, the stakes of current negotiations are at an all-time high.

On the table for advertisers are everything from shifting the traditional Upfront calendar to rethinking the value of the CPM to demanding greater accountability for the way networks deliver—or don’t deliver—gross ratings points promised to them.

Family Entertainment Television (FETV), which launched in 2013 with a roster of classic TV shows such as Perry Mason, Bewitched and The Wild Wild West, is working an angle that can best be summed up in an age-old idiom: Put your money where your mouth is.

The network is guaranteeing its advertisers delivery of gross ratings points in-flight, solving the long contentious issue of brands having their ads run outside of a predetermined window, on a platform they didn’t expect or worse—not getting delivered at all.

“Our goal is to be a true partner to marketers,” says Drew Sumrall, CEO of FETV. “We aim to make television advertising on FETV effective and deliver what the client needs.”

“Our clients have a goal-based on a marketing plan. So not being able to deliver that marketing plan, and getting made good somewhere else doesn’t solve the problem,” says Jason Kanefsky, chief investment officer at Havas Media, whose clients include Beats by Dre, Domino’s, Hyundai/Kia, Starbucks and TripAdvisor. “It erases the problem monetarily, but it doesn’t solve the problem that was created.”

“A lot of frustration is because some networks can’t deliver GRPs all in television so they put audience deficiency units in other media assets like social and digital,” Karen Bressner, EVP of national advertising sales at FETV, tells Cynopsis. “Once they started it became standard operating procedure for payback. At FETV, we want to deliver GRPs in flight and in the television schedule that was purchased.”

Bressner says FETV, which has 53.1 million subscribers and targets the A25-54 demo, wants to eliminate that frustration. Buyers spend months doing a media plan where they allocate funds for GRPs in television, social and digital, she says. “And then you get to the execution stage and that media plan calculation becomes another mix based on where a media family can deliver the negotiated impressions for the brand. Well, that doesn’t really work for the brand. There’s a reason why they wanted this many GRPs in television, this many in social and this many in digital. There’s a whole formula that goes into that.”

Mix in this year’s upended production schedules and massive market uncertainty, and the result is a market primed for disruption. In June the Association of National Advertisers, which represents 1,600 companies that annually spend upward of $400 billion on advertising, released a paper seeking an industry overhaul and alerting media companies many members intended to delay new purchases. Advertisers across verticals from retail to travel to automotive are rethinking their budgets and seeking greater flexibility.

FETV’s strategy is simple yet effective. “Our projections are realistic,” Bressner says. “If we see a change we include recap or adu in flight immediately. Or, if an advertiser opts for the traditional syndication model of ‘cash back,’ we will lower rates to hit the guaranteed CPM.”

Given the current scenario, the guarantee is a good play for FETV, says Joanna Travlos, EVP and director at Starcom, who reps Vista Print and Sandals, among clients. “They’re Nielsen-rated… and if they go into the Upfront and say, ‘We’ve got this guarantee for you, and here’s our CPM,’ with everything going on this year they should do well,” she tells Cynopsis.

“The smaller networks don’t have the big overhead because their stuff is mostly licensed so they don’t have to worry about production. Those guys can survive better in this marketplace,” Travlos says, because their costs are lower than that of others. And they can elevate their status, she adds, “if they price themselves right and do deals that help the market overall bring down the CPMs.”

“I wish more cable networks, the larger ones—who are under-delivering by 10 percent to 15 percent on a regular basis—would adopt this philosophy,” Kanefsky says of the in-flight model. “Clients should pay for what they get.” But he’s quick to note he doesn’t expect even a global pandemic to elicit much of an overhaul in the television industry’s advertising sales apparatus.

Bressner, who along with her sales team, has been out in force this month alerting advertisers and agencies about FETV’s new ratings points promise, is optimistic about the network’s role as the indie that roared.

“Yes, we’re just one top-70 network, but it has to start somewhere. Let us be the one that you can say to everyone else, ‘This is who we’re doing business with, this is how we do it, we’re getting our GRPs guaranteed in flight,’” she says.

“It’s a little piece of a bigger picture, but it’s really important that this piece is done right. If that part of your media plan is falling apart, then your whole media plan is going to fall apart. We’re able to help clients keep our part of the deal. That’s a game changer.”