ABC Selling Its Ad Slots to Affiliates

The Wall Street Journal

Walt Disney Co.’s ABC network is trying out a new approach to ad sales: selling national ad slots to local ABC stations.

The sales, which will begin with six 30-second prime-time slots in the last two weeks of October in “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Modern Family” and other shows, are timed to enable both the network and the stations to cash in on an historic crush of political advertising tied to the midterm elections.

But ABC hopes to use the approach at other times of the year, taking advantage of a wrinkle in the TV market: the aggregate price for the local ads that air on all ABC stations in a particular ad slot is often higher than the price ABC can get for a single national ad. More…