Fox Assumes A New Position

With Fox News consistently penetrating the top basic cable news network ratings (USA #1, Fox #2, TNT #3.  CNN and MSNBC are consistently ranked in the 20s and 30s).

Ad Age on Fox's new strategy:  Paul Rittenberg, exec VP-ad sales for Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network and Fox News Digital, said Fox's big push to advertisers this year will be to pit its upscale audience against the more mass-reach networks like TNT and USA. "For the last six months, we've been trying to position ourselves as more than just direct competition with CNN; that's over for us in a way," he said. "The general perception among media buyers, especially the 25-year-olds who don't watch TV news anyway, is that it's downscale. But there's no number that doesn't contradict that."

Part of Fox's upfront pitch will include a slide that shows its share of 25- to 54-year-old viewers with household incomes of $100,000 or more. Among its broader competitive cable set, Fox has 26% share of cable's gross rating points among that audience, more than History (12%), Discovery (11%) and CNN (9%).

CNN, of course, was its biggest competitor in a cable-news horse race that used to be fairly neck-and-neck among viewers 25-to-54 until Fox finally pulled ahead for good in 2009. CNN now often ranks fourth or fifth in a five-network prime-time cable news race that also includes sibling network Headline News, CNBC and MSNBC.

Although that makes the network a mid-tier player in terms of net ad spending, it's enough to make the network the most profitable division of News Corp., as CEO Rupert Murdoch recently told The New York Times.

But in previous years, pricing and higher cost-per-thousand-viewer rates, or CPMs, was a game CNN was winning, as Fox held out to sell more volume in its upfront negotiations. CNN continues to command a higher price for many of its programs despite ratings attrition in 2009, and it grossed $415 million in measured ad spending in 2009, according to Kantar, a 0.7% decrease from 2008. CNN has been pitching advertisers on the growth of its online video views as well as its out-of-home viewing in airports and bars, as measured by Arbitron, which helped them hold on to more ad dollars even as prime-time ratings dropped.

However, three media buyers Ad Age spoke to said Fox has started to close the CPM gap with CNN despite the latter's multiplatform pitch.

Mr. Rittenberg admitted that Fox News has a ways to go online in terms of traffic and views -- its 9 million monthly uniques trails CNN's 33 million, according to ComScore -- and will continue to push more inventory before holding out for higher pricing.

"At the end of the day, you can't take a CPM to the bank," he said. "If an advertiser is impressed enough by our story to commit an incremental $1 million or $2 million, we'll have succeeded."

Yeah, this is all inside baseball, but... BTW Fox was on top of the Sunday health care cable bloviating talking head orgy.