Michael Wolff: Upfronts not ready for prime-time reality

• The American audience is in inexorable flight from scheduled TV
• Anyone who watches ads probably doesn%27t have means to buy anything
• American marketers have largely turned up their nose to digital

The Upfronts are a media ritual that stretches back to the early days of television. It's when networks offer advertisers a locked-in deal if they buy space for the fall season in the spring instead of waiting until the new shows air, when the costs, especially for hit shows, might likely go up.

Forget the fact that there really is no longer a fall season, that a hit now is hardly what a hit was then, that television networks are themselves pale imitations of what they were — once again the Upfronts are on. Theaters are rented in Manhattan, network heads and ad sales executives are rehearsed, assorted stars are unhappily drafted to participate and, in old-fashioned variety-show format, the new shows are launched and the old patted on the back.

For a generation or longer, the Upfronts have been a sleight of hand in which advertisers are offered less for more. Audiences shrink, impact lessens, rates rise and, for many years now, almost everybody in the television and advertising business has expected a collective awakening and for ad dollars to head for the exit doors.

But, no. The money still flows. Cable joined the networks at the Upfronts, and television executives and advertising agencies, in a symbiotic bid to save each other's jobs, every year patch together in Hail Mary fashion an ever-smaller fraction of the once-great national television audience.

It's preposterous, really. It defies reality. It's smokin' something. Not only is the American audience in inexorable flight from scheduled television, but the kind of person who actually watches ads, given all the available ways to avoid them, is unlikely to be sentient enough to actually hold a job and have the money to buy anything.

At least, that is the reasonable view of a great number of people in the digital media business, who for the better part of a decade have been confounded by the fact that big-brand and big-budget advertisers have failed to keep pace with the movement of the American consumer from television to the Web and mobile platforms.

Despite this overwhelming trend, and even with all the new measurement tools to calibrate the digital audience's actual attention to advertising, not to mention the vastly lower cost of Web and mobile ads, the great and powerful American marketer has still largely turned up his nose to digital — even as it's become a video medium. A Niagara of video.

There are many theories about why this has happened — or not happened — but several years ago those theories coalesced around a singular idea. Digital media was challenged because it lacked an Upfront.

Under the auspices of Digitas, an advertising agency specializing in, well, digital advertising, the "NewFronts" were inaugurated in 2008 to showcase digital content.

Last year, blaming logistical challenges, as well as being regularly disappointed by digital video's failure to catch fire, Digitas turned these sub-Upfronts over to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. (The IAB sets the standards for online advertising formats, including the much-derided banner ad, and has waged a largely unsuccessful campaign to attract big brands to the Internet.)

And, once again, there is considerable anticipation in the marketplace that this is the year, as opposed to all the past years that were supposed to be the year, that online video is going to start to really claim its fair share of the advertising pie.

Advertisers have to advertise, don't they? And they'll have to follow the audience eventually, won't they?

Sure, big brands have been allergic to the low-budget quality of online video. Online video may be most notable for not being watched. The digital audience is possibly even more distracted than the television audience. And "pre-roll," that herky-jerky placement before a video starts, is a desperate and hopelessly maladroit showcase for anybody's message.

Still, AOL and YouTube, along with Yahoo, Hulu, Blip, Crackle, Microsoft and a dozen other companies, have made especially aggressive pitches over the last few weeks that their content is not only capturing a meaningful, demographically appealing audience, but it's cutting-edge, culture-moving stuff.

Their pitch is either "we've got stars like you've never seen them before" — Christina Ricci on AOL or John Stamos on Yahoo with a show about how celebrities lost their virginity — or "we've got non-celebrities who are even bigger than celebrities," such as viral make-up videos on YouTube with a hundred zillion views.

And yet, last week, in the middle of all this strained bonhomie, YouTube announced that it is launching a subscription service, deftly undermining the hopes and dreams of an advertising Renaissance on the Internet.

The real message of the continued resistance to digital content, and the ever-disappointing digital Upfronts, is that while advertisers may inevitably leave TV — and as a generation of chief marketing officers dies out, they surely will leave — they won't necessarily be going anywhere else.

Indeed, the Upfronts, whether for television or digital, are, in proper Mad Men fashion, nostalgic and wistful, a desire to return to better days. (And, in the case of digital, a desire to return to what it never had.)

But harder hearts in the new entertainment business, seeing a world without ads, are manning up to the fact that they are going to have to make you pay to watch John Stamos.

Michael Wolff can be reached at michael@burnrate.com and on Twitter @MichaelWolffNYC.