Discovery CFO: Q2 Ad Sales Flat
Upfront ‘Slower to Come Together'
by Mike Farrell -- Multichannel News, 5/18/2009 4:48:10 PM
Upfront 2009 coverage from Multichannel News
Discovery Communications chief financial officer Brad Singer repeated the cautious stance he took on the programmer's first-quarter conference call last month, telling an audience at an industry conference Monday that second-quarter advertising growth should be flat.
Discovery far outpaced some of its much larger programming
brethren in the first quarter, reporting 2% domestic ad sales growth. Most of
the other publicly traded cable programmers reported declining ad sales in the
quarter.
But despite that performance, and comments from top programming executives that the ad market is stabilizing and that the worst is over, Singer didn't quite go there.
"The worst is over -- it's kind of hard for anyone to make that statement on a completely data-driven basis," Singer said at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston Monday. "What we think is that things are about the same. We felt that 2% revenue growth was a very good number to deliver in the first quarter. The second quarter, when we say flat, that is about where the market is. When you look into the third quarter, we don't have the book firmed up yet."
Singer said that while it is still early in the upfront process, so far it is consistent with the first quarter.
"It is a much slower to come together advertising environment," Singer said. "We're still selling the second quarter, and this is mid-May."
But Singer was optimistic that the ad market will work itself out over time and networks that continue to air compelling programming, maintain their ratings momentum and manage their costs smartly, will rode out the storm.
"This is not right now what we would call by any stretch of the imagination a robust environment," Singer said. "But we are managing it fairly well."Discovery, Liberty Look Abroad
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