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CBS CEO Leslie Moonves speaking at the Deutsche Bank Media & Telecom Conference in Palm Beach, Fla on Monday stated that CBS would enforce “substantial increases” in ad rates, reaching into the double digits. Moonves reported a 40 percent increase in the January “scatter sales” period, when the company sells remaining ad inventory. Moonves was unfazed by the prospect of marketers rebelling at higher fees.
“We’ll just sell it all in scatter,” Moonves told the conference, if marketers balked at the potentially much higher rates. Moonves also predicted that the company would earn $2.5 billion in annual retransmission consent fees and emphasized that the company’s ad time is “vastly undervalued. Watch Moonves’ keynote from the conference here
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