AD BUYERS DUMPING LOCAL TV, SWITCHING TO CABLE

Several companies that operate in regional markets are pulling their commercials off local television stations and switching them to national cable outlets instead, even though their ads often wind up being carried in parts of the country where the companies don’t operate, Advertising Age reported today (Monday). The trade publication cited the fast-food outlets Dairy Queen, Domino’s Pizza and Sonic Drive-Ins as examples. “This is a definite trend in the industry,” Dairy Queen CMO Michael Keller told AdAge. “You can see in the data more and more medium-size competitors in our market have moved to national [buys] using cable as their springboard because it’s national and much more affordable.” Sonic’s marketing chief, Dominic Losacco, added: “It was more efficient for us to buy cable nationally than on a market-by-market basis.” But Jack Poor, head of strategic planning at the Television Bureau of Advertising, was quoted as saying that the price of local ads is now falling and noted that “the brand people” who are shifting their ads to cable have “lost a lot of the economic argument.”