AdAge

CBS has largely completed its upfront sales, according to the network.

"As we near the finish line, we are very confident that CBS has once again achieved the highest pricing and most total dollars in the upfront marketplace," the company said. "Agencies and clients continue to value the strength, stability and delivery that we provide as a pure-play broadcaster, and we are very pleased that in addition to C3, C7 is now playing a meaningful part in our negotiations."

CBS has been among the most vocal in asking advertisers to pay for ads viewed within seven days of their original airing rather than the current industry standard of three days. Media agency network GroupM agreed to negotiate broadly on that week-long basis, known as C7.

While CBS again ended the season as the most-watched channel overall, its total viewership dropped 9%, meaning it had fewer ratings points to sell going into next season. It also lost its lead in viewers aged 18 to 49 years old, where NBC came in No. 1.

Other media agencies aren't likely to follow in GroupM's footsteps by striking broad agreements to use C7 in upfront deals, according to people familiar with the upfront market.

GroupM has entered into agreements with broadcasters including CBS, Fox and NBC to pay for ad time based on commercial ratings across seven days, a measure called C7 in the industry.

The current standard, C3, only considers commercials seen within a three-day window. While most agencies did C7 deals for select clients during the 2013 upfront, GroupM's agreements will apply to a breadth of clients across its portfolio of agencies, according to people familiar with the pacts, making it the biggest move yet into paying for seven-day viewing.

GroupM, WPP's powerful media-agency group, controls about 30% of the total dollars spent on network TV, with clients like Procter & Gamble, AT&T and Paramount Pictures. And RBC Capital Markets analyst David Bank wrote that most other agencies will "likely have to move in lock-step at some point soon."

But its move isn't likely to generate a domino effect, at least not in 2014, some media buyers and others insist. Other agencies are still hesitant to strike broad-based agreements for C7 that would apply to a majority of their clients.

[Commentary] At this point, the topic may make your eyes glaze over. But make no mistake: network neutrality is a big deal for that ad business, and in turn, the ad-supported media ecosystem.

The companies that control the last mile of the Internet -- the likes of Comcast and Time Warner Cable -- would like to be able to charge different prices for the use of their pipes into the home. But while the net neutrality debate has focused on companies that provide entertainment or services on the web -- Google, Facebook and Netflix, for example -- it is also significant for marketers that use those pipes to communicate with their customers, like Unilever and P&G.

As the Federal Communications Commission comes closer to setting actual rules that might establish a multi-tiered system of fast lanes and slow lanes, they should be paying attention. If the FCC does allow Internet Service Providers to give speedier data delivery to companies willing to pay for the privilege, the online ad and publishing industries could look a lot different in the not-so-distant future.

Small publishers and small ad tech firms could fall prey to large firms able to pay for fast-tracking. Digital audiences and ad inventory could be redistributed. Publisher revenue models could shift towards more ad-subsidization or more subscription offerings. It might take a lot longer to load a video ad than the page content around it, or vice versa depending on who pays for better service. And new competition in today's commoditized programmatic ad sector could become reality.

"Pricing will go up for access from a marketing perspective in terms of CPMs," suggested Joe Apprendi, founder and CEO of ad-buying firm Collective and a digital ad industry vet. If a multi-tiered system forces more publishers away from ads to subscriptions, he said, that's also bad for marketers.

[Commentary] The "war on women" might be the creation of a political advertising consultant.

But make no mistake: There will be a war for women this electoral season as both parties shoot it out over a key constituency.

An "enormous portion" of advertising will be "devoted to persuading women or repressing the women's vote," said Elizabeth Wilner, senior VP of Kantar Media Ad Intelligence.

The war over women has already begun as Democrats hope to continue the success the party has had in recent elections casting Republicans as insensitive about women's issues. Congressional Democrats have added equal pay, the minimum wage and other pocketbook issues of interest to women to their standard fare of reproductive choice and access to contraception that were very effective in recent elections.

And even as President Barack Obama and other Democrats are pummeled by GOP attacks on the Affordable Care Act, they're attempting a bit of jujitsu by reminding women that Obamacare offers free mammograms and other no-cost preventive care and allows children to stay on their parent's health policies until they are 26 years old.

Media measurement needs "a governing authority" to address shortcomings that have dogged the industry for decades, and getting one has become a top priority of the Association of National Advertisers, the group's CEO Bob Liodice said at the opening of its Advertising Financial Management Conference in Naples (FL).

“We do not have a very good handle on the performance of our media measurements," Liodice said, in an unusually pointed address opening the session.

But even in the best case it could take a year or two to establish a governing authority and how much power it would have, he said later.

The effort is an outgrowth of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, which involved those same groups and recently led to adoption of a standard for measuring whether online banner ads are viewed (at least 50% of pixels for at least one second). A similar standard for video advertising set to emerge in June.

Apple's mobile-operating system is losing its advantage over Google's Android when it comes to attracting advertisers' dollars, according to a new study.

In a report, mobile-ad platform Opera Mediaworks found that devices running Android sent a greater percentage of ad requests in the first quarter of 2014 than those running Apple's iOS.

"The quality of the advertising that we can deliver on a Samsung and Android device is pretty much on par with an iOS," Mahi de Silva, CEO of Opera Mediaworks said. The report found that, in the first quarter, Android devices' share of mobile-ad requests reached 42.8%, up from 31.3%. Over that time iOS's share fell to 38.2% from 44.5%.

Instead of going to the bathroom or grabbing a beer during commercial breaks, TV watchers are increasingly turning to a new ritual: checking their phones until the show resumes.

For advertisers paying top dollar for TV ads, the trend is frustrating, presenting yet another challenge in their quest to gain a share of consumers' fragmented attention.

But Xaxis, the WPP-owned programmatic platform, believes it's found a way to reach these distracted consumers. The company is introducing a product called "Sync," which will give advertisers the ability to serve ads on TV watchers' mobile devices while their TV screens air the corresponding commercials.

Sync takes an educated guess as to which households are watching the TV show its clients' commercials are running on. To figure this out, it combines TV watching behavioral data from Kantar Media with geographic data and other signals, including whether a consumer's device is logged into a home Wi-Fi network and stationary.

When Sync thinks a person is likely watching a show, it will serve ads targeted to their mobile devices as its client's TV commercial airs. Sync connects to satellite data, getting a two-second heads-up on which commercials will run as the TV show goes to break. When a client's ad is set to play, Sync will turn on its ad campaign and keep it live for a few minutes.

If political races have become data wars, conventional wisdom has it, the Democrats clearly have the advantage in 2014 and 2016.

After all, the stockpiles of data from President Barack Obama's two campaigns have been deposited in the party's armory alongside the software to put it to good use.

But while the party as a whole navigates a newly treacherous political landscape -- none other than Nate Silver predicted the Democrats could actually lose control of the Senate -- individual campaigns across the country may struggle to use something as big and complex as President Obama's data trove, which was built for a nationwide campaign.

Despite the party's mission to provide unified, fresh data and underlying standardized technology platforms for all, there's a limited pool of practitioners who know how to put all this stuff to use for the more than 6,000 races in 2014. Over 1,000 state party staff and activists were trained to use the database platform by the Democratic National Congress in 2013, both in person and through webinars, learning how to do things like run queries using SQL, a database-management-programming language. But even if a small campaign has the money and wherewithal to hire a voter-file manager, most will have limited analytical resources.

Viacom is taking steps toward offering advertisers guarantees for the social media impact it can give them.

The company, which owns networks such as MTV and Comedy Central, plans to underpin the guarantees with data from Mass Relevance on social activity across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Google + and YouTube in real time, according to Jeff Lucas, head of sales, music and entertainment, at Viacom.

The resulting measurement platform -- dubbed Echograph -- will bring a level of accountability to social media that has yet to be seen from TV networks, Lucas said. It will let Viacom give clients data on reach, influencers, engagement, age and gender breakdowns and hashtag popularity, among others.

Marketers such as Honda are increasingly fed up with sky-high prices associated with sports marketing. They warn a "day of reckoning" is coming when Madison Avenue will just say "No" to hyper-expensive sports programming such as the Super Bowl.

As one of the last bastions of DVR-proof TV, the price of sports -- from the prices paid by marketers for sponsorships and 30-second ads to TV rights paid by media companies -- continues to climb. But it's rare for marketers to publicly declare they're reaching the end of their rope. And to threaten to move their ad dollars away from sports media and into cheaper social and digital marketing.

But that's what they did during one panel at the 2014 IMG World Congress of Sports presented by SportsBusiness Daily. When Terry Lefton, editor-at-large for SBJ, asked whether marketers had finally reached a tipping point with escalating sports prices, several marketers sounded off.

Tom Peyton, assistant VP-advertising for American Honda, noted that the auto-maker devotes 18% to 22% of its annual media budget to sports. And the company isn't getting more sports for its money. It's just paying higher and higher prices. The time is coming when resentful marketers like Honda could decide enough is enough. "It could go very quickly. Yeah, the day of reckoning is soon," said Petyon.