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"Makegoods," where a television network fulfills its inventory obligations for ads that were purchased but not aired, are of particular interest this year in the wake of last fall's WGA strike — where lots of prime-time inventory was lost because new episodes of shows were delayed or cancelled. ABC's solution has begun to offer advertisers digital inventory instead of broadcast inventory, which is smart for two reasons.

First, ABC wants to keep broadcast inventory for this season open, not waste it on ads purchased at last year's upfronts, and also preserves the higher online ad rate while luring customers with a price break. Second, it floods ABC online video inventory with actual ads, giving their data larger sample sizes with which to set rates and measure performance. One anonymous media executive quoted by MediaPost remained skeptical: "How can this beat full-screen television? We don't even know if they can measure the Internet properly, let alone giving us a demographic breakdown."