The TV upfronts — that time every year when TV networks sell advertising inventory to clients in bulk — was down this year by 5%, the most since the economic downturn in the 2009-10 TV season.

Over the past couple of weeks, major media companies have run the media/investor gauntlet while reporting second-quarter earnings. During those, many media CEOs addressed why upfronts were down. Most of them used different logic to evaluate the problem, but when the comments are looked at as a whole, some trends emerge, as Ad Week points out here.

Both Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and 21st Century Fox’s Chase Carey admitted that certain major sectors — automotive, telecommunications and consumer packaged goods — were down.

Discovery’s David Zaslav and Scripps Networks Interactive’ Burton F. Jablin both said their companies elected to hold inventory for scatter, which comes later in the year and is usually more expensive than upfront pricing. That might be an especially risky proposition this year, however, because the more companies that hold out for scatter, the more inventory that’s available, the lower scatter prices will drop.

Disney CEO Bob Iger and Comcast CEO Steve Burke both said that a significant chunk of spending was moving to digital, taking revenue away from traditional TV. Both CEOs also are looking to scatter to bring some of that money back.

Finally, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves continued to push his — not unreasonable — view that TV should now be bought on a C7 basis, meaning that advertisers should have to pay for commercial views seen over a seven-day window.

“[W]e as programmers … have to look at the world in an entirely different way. Nobody should even be looking at overnights anymore. The C7 number is really the number that matters, and it is a substantial amount of money that’s gone into it,” Moonves told investors.

As summer ends, fourth quarter begins and the networks’ new shows launch, we’ll see how kind the scatter market is to TV.

Read more: Ad Week

Brief Take: Viewers are consuming more TV and video than ever before and the economy is stronger than its been in years. The issue for TV networks is how to most efficiently monetize views when they no longer happen in a traditional way.

Image courtesy of themrsite.com.

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