Media buyers appear to have secured a climbdown from the ITV sales
houses over the issue of how advertising airtime is traded for 1998.
Concern has been mounting among media agencies over reports that each
sales house is pursuing a sales stance based on the share of total TV
spend that agencies are willing to commit to ITV as a whole.
Now the three ITV sales houses - Laser, Carlton and TSMS - have written
to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising insisting that there is
no collusion among the ITV sales points.
Ray Kelly, the chairman of the IPA’s Media Policy Group, confirmed that
the letters insist that each sales house will seek deals based on their
individual share of total TV spend, and deals won’t be dependent on
spend committed to ITV as a whole. The sales operations will do deals
based on ITV’s share of broadcast if that is the basis on which
individual agencies or advertisers wish to trade.
However, some agency broadcast directors were this week insisting that
deals based on an ITV share of total spend were still being tabled by
the sales houses. ’This is not a dead issue,’ one explained.
A major consultant at the Billett Consultancy said this week deals
guaranteeing ITV’s share of spend ’are not all in advertisers
interests’, and urged clients to back their agencies against the policy.
