“Wrong Direction”: Linear TV Advertising & Original Productions’ Future Bleak, Ken Ziffren Warns
deadline.comLinear TV advertising and original production are falling fast, and don’t expect sports to save the industry, Ken Ziffren said today. “On the whole, the combination of online and social media viewing, on the revenue front will not increase consumer spend,” the famously circumspect Ziffren Brittenham LLP co-founder warned the Beverly Hills Bar Association in his annual lecture Friday. “I don’t know if we can reverse these trends. .that we can bring them back to ancient 2020 situations where we had consumer spend and entertainment spend on a growth greater than the CPI both here and around the world.” To that, the self-declared “pessimistic” Ziffren put a spotlight on how much programing is now viewed free on social media.
Add to that the serious and seemingly unstoppable decline that has kicked in for the ad market in part with the “encroachment of tech companies” to Hollywood. “We seem to be going in the “wrong direction,” Ziffren bluntly said.
In his forensics on the industry, the lawyer focused in on advertising tiers on streamers (with the exception of Apple) and the quiet but dramatic shift such companies away from the push and pull of Wall Street. “Lower cost streaming through bundling” and a shift to unscripted and sports will not increase the consumer outlay, Ziffren predicted.
Big media is in the throes of a painful reckoning as core linear viewership and correlated ad revenue that sustained it for decades fades.
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