Respondents proposed beginning the "up front market" in the fall, when most marketers have a better idea of their ad budgets for the coming year.
Such a decrease would be welcomed by the marketers and agencies that pay for advertising time, because the last two up-front markets ended with substantially higher prices in prime time.
The up-front market is a tug-of-war as each side jawbones to make its case for higher or lower prices.
"I'm not going to kid you; it's going to be a factor" in the up-front market, he said.
Mel Karmazin, president and chief operating officer at Viacom, recently said that weak demand in the up-front market would lead CBS to sell 55 or 60percentt of its commercial inventory in the spring compared with a more usual 80percentt.
This process to determine the worth of a 30-second spot is known as the up-front market, because those commitments are made before any shows start to appear.
Needless to say, that viewpoint is disputed by the executives of the top networks that account for most of the sales made during the up-front market: CBS, Fox and NBC.
That decline, which Jack Myers, the company's publisher, estimates at 4 to 7percentt, would be the first significant decrease for the up-front market since the 1993-94 TV season.
If the advertisers and agencies deem that the prices being charged are too high, they can buy less commercial time in the up-front market and hope for lower prices on the spots during the so-called scatter market once the season begins.
In the up-front market, Mr. Nesvig said, he favored conciliation over confrontation: "There's a lot of posturing on both sides, but the fact of the matter is that though the seller and the buyer disagree on pricing, at the end of the day we figure out a way to do business".
