For the past 11 years, Brad Adgate has been senior vice president and director of research at Horizon Media, an independent media agency with annual billings of $2 billion.

All told, Adgate counts more than 30 years keeping track of audiences and listeners and making sure ad dollars are well spent.

Other careers stops: Grey Advertising, Backer & Spielvogel and Saatchi & Saachi.

Along the way Adgate has collected a number of industry awards, but none more media-forward perhaps than that bestowed by Advertising Age earlier this year when it included him among the "25 Media People You Should Follow on Twitter."

In this interview with TVNewsCheck Editor Harry A. Jessell, Adgate offers his thoughts on national spot's place in the array of advertising options and what it must do to get a larger share of marketing dollars.

An edited transcript:

How does national spot stack up against national syndication and cable?

It's got pretty much a leg up. When you're buying national spot, you can buy any market you want. You can cherry pick your markets. You may want to buy or not buy certain markets to do some testing in and so on and so fourth. So I think that it's still a very viable option.

Syndication is a strong competitor, but once you get past the top-tier shows, they're not in every market. Local cable reaches only 60 percent of the country. Satellite is approaching a 30 percent market share, but there are no local avails there.

But you could buy national cable.

But it's only 85 or 90 percent of the country. There are 210 DMAs. If you want to buy all of them or if you want to buy some of them or cherry pick them, you've got to buy national spot.

What is the big objection to national spot from agency planners? Is it more expensive?

Not in the larger markets — TV markets 40 and up. Below that, it becomes expensive to buy. You may as well buy network as opposed to national spot. You get more bang for your buck if you're buying a network than if you're buying a lot of local DMAs collectively.

Why do national spot dollars keep shrinking?

There are more opportunities out there than ever before for marketers to spend their dollars. They're still spending a substantial amount of the budgets on television, but there are more and more opportunities.

It's really the Web and all these other nascent media that marketers are looking at. That's the reason local TV and national spot TV has been flat to down in recent years.

The next step in television is going to be taking the second-by-second viewing data and coming up with addressable ads that can be targeted to individual homes and interactive ads where you can click on your remote and get more information on the [product]. Marketers are looking at this. They have said that they would pay a premium for a medium that can deliver an ad for a car to someone who is interested in buying one.

That doesn't bode well for TV stations because they really can't play that game, can they?

The cable box and other digital set-top boxes contain that type of information. So, they'd have to purchase it or they'd have to partner with someone like a TiVo or a Comcast to get it.

Broadcasters can get the audience data, but only cable or the Internet can target the ads.

Why couldn't a broadcast station target an ad? Why couldn't, say, WNBC here in New York deliver an ad for a Ford sedan if you live in Manhattan and a Ford SUV if you're living in regions north and west of the city where the weather is worse?

If WNBC and other broadcast stations say they're not going to go on these cable systems unless they get compensated for it, they can also demand to be treated like cable networks.

Do you think TV stations do a good job selling themselves to national advertisers and agencies like you?

Yes, I think they do. The TVB [Television Bureau of Advertising] has come in and talked about certain product categories and comparing TV to other media. Television is still the first screen and it's still the center of the living room and the broadcasters have gotten that message across.

Let's talk about programming a little bit. What do you think of the Jay Leno experiment so far?

Well, NBC is a client of ours so I think it's fabulous.

I will say this: The golden age of the 10 o'clock drama in broadcasting is over. We had 30 years of great 10 o'clock dramas from 1979 when Lou Grant won an Emmy award for best drama right | More …