By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Funny…
There is little question, the studios are a bit tighter this year with throwing around the expensive awards season ad buys.
Ironically, Peter Bart, whose Variety ad sales team has done its best to undercut everyone else selling advertising in the awards season world, is the first – and likely only – ad seller to publicly whine about what he sees as “significantly reduced support” in this season.
In his very best McCain, he spins what are surely reduced revenues at the on-the-selling-block Variety into some kind of failure on the part of the studios to support the talent involved with movies. Bzzzt! Reality Check: The belt tightening finally caught up to Variety, in spite of coming close to killing off The Hollywood Reporter and even with the advantage of studios that are being very tight with other outlets still buying at the Gray Drag Queen of Movie Journalism (it works hard to look a certain way from the outside… it is something very different if you look under its journalistic skirt).
Perhaps Mr. Bart feels particularly bend out of shape by the round rejection of his blog as a central hub of $15,000 a month Oscar insight… of course, on top of the ad prices for the rest of Variety and Variety.com.
More likely, Variety is slightly down for the season, as compared to last year, in ad sales, in spite of price hikes across the board.
There should be some relief for Pete & Co. as a few last minute players jump in the water. But this whole public moaning is very dangerous because it may well stick the whole ad buy idea in the faces of the bosses who could wonder aloud,
“As a person with a website that has more readers than Variety.com but no ad sales team pushing the studios every day, demanding world supremacy, it
Not a lie.
We have discussed, publicly and privately, the problems with Alexa in the past.
Do you have something new to kick in? Or just innuendo and rage?
frankly, I think it’s a different world Nov. 5th and the political films out there, like Milk and Frost/Nixon are going to be affected by the results, studios are hedging their advertising to see how things play out and what the temperature of the academy, hollywood and the country is after the election. Will escapist cinema be hot if McCain wins? Will Seven Pounds get an Obama bump? How is Wall Street going to react to an Obama presidency and how is their reaction going to affect belt tightening or loosening at the studios? Lots of unknowns right now, and that very fact should create a window of oppurtunity for a studio willing to take risks while everyone else is being conservative, but it hasn’t seemed to happen yet. Interesting.
Not rage. Just bewilderment. Even with a margin of error, alexa.com refutes your claim, but there is also trafficestimate.com for a rough idea. If you think their numbers are off by millions, so be it…