Goodbye Super Bowl, hello Hallmark Channel.
General Motors agreed to spend money in the TV upfront negotiations but has come away with deals that moved its advertising out of top-tier networks and shows and into less expensive units, The Post has learned.
GM, which still counts the government as a shareholder, is trying to get more bang for its advertising buck and was pressing for a 20 percent cut in CPMs — cost per thousand eyeballs. The carmaker has an annual advertising budget of $1.8 billion. Of that, Kantar Media reports, GM spent $1.1 billion on TV in 2011, a 7.6 percent year-over-year decline.
Joel Ewanick, GM’s global marketing chief, has been a loud critic of both spiraling ad costs and of ads that don’t work — an approach that could risk the firm’s position as the sector’s No. 1 media buyer. Carmakers spent $13.9 billion on TV ads in 2011, up 6.3 percent from 2010.
Ewanick ruffled feathers when he pulled the entire display advertising budget from Facebook just ahead of the company’s public offering. (AdAge later reported that GM had wanted to take over pages, a move Facebook wouldn’t allow.)
Just days after the Facebook news, Ewanick said it would exit CBS’ Super Bowl, citing its exorbitant cost. Ads are selling for $3.8 million per 30-second spot.
It’s hard to say whether it got TV executives to budge much on price. “In order to help them save face, there were offers of multiyear deals and dialing up the tonnage and dialing down the quality,” said one executive familiar with GM’s buys.
To rev up its ad power, GM added dollars with less expensive networks, including Discovery’s Investigation Discovery and Crown Media’s Hallmark Channel, sources said. GM has said it isn’t spending less money overall.
“Universally, the market looked at what GM did as a botched approach without a coherent fallback plan,” said one Madison Avenue source. “The remedies were that people downgraded their mix of inventory and said no to the 20 percent rollback.”
In one example, GM, traditionally an advertiser on the Golden Globes, agreed to a new sponsorship of the much smaller BET awards for its Chevrolet brand, according to reports.
A spokesman for GM told The Post, “We have remained consistent in our position that we will not talk publicly about our negotiations with the networks.” Reps at Discovery and Hallmark declined to comment.
Meanwhile, most of the big cable ad sales groups are close to concluding their deals. Early forecasts have the cable upfront take coming at around $9.8 billion, up from $9.3 billion last year. Average CPMs were up in the 5 percent to 6 percent range.
Other results from the upfronts, sources said, include:
* Procter & Gamble spent less money than last year;
* Microsoft made much bigger ad commitments to help market Windows 8 and Xbox products;
* The fall slate of movies will likely skew more male so entertainment cash swung towards male-focused outlets.