Imagine the NYSE without the Dow Jones. It's a nonsense
Imagine a stock traders desk without Bloomberg. Another nonsense.
Track across to the UK and imagine the London Stock Exchange without the Financial Times Stock prices (FTSE) for the top 100 and top 250 companies. What an absolute nonsense.

Yet that structure is precisely what the US network TV traders have conjoured up for the buying, selling and trading of airtime.

The sellers know all the prices but the buyers have to rely on those often error filled statutes of experience and common sense and just make do without empirical evidence from the market. A one-sided match if ever there was one. Federer would always win if Nadal doesn't turn up.

But this is worse. TV Network trading is a wholly imperfect market where the buyers deliver on a plate the demand coefficients to the seller - without which the seller could not manage the inventory - and get nothing back in return.

What a way to run a railway. But given the mess that is Amtrak perhaps that's what we've come to expect

 

Incidentally the analogy with the legal profession is quite right (what a misnomer that phrase "profession" is in this context). There too it's a market where the buyer always loses.

Laws are made by lawyers who make them complicated to understand so we have to use lawyers to sort things out. Here the defence and prosecution are on the same side versus the users

 

Its therefore not surprising that there is so much hard feeling towards the entry of EBay and others to the notion of the TV market auction. After all if they succeed then there would be no hiding place and advertisers might get a depth of insight into trading prices that would make for a perfect market.

It's good that the MPMA business we started a few years ago is making such big strides in proving real market place prices for advertisers. Who knows the TV market might get to behave like a market at last.