#Cox, Fox and CBS Reach $48M Settlement in TV Ad Price-Fixing Litigation

Cox Communications, CBS and Fox have reached a $48 million deal to settle a long-running TV advertising antitrust complaint and will “provide meaningful cooperation” to help plaintiffs in their case against the remaining defendants, according to a May 26 filing. Those defendants include Meredith, Nexstar, Raycom, Scripps, Sinclair, TEGNA and Tribune.

The litigation began in 2018, when a series of complaints were filed across the country that alleged the broadcasters and their sales firms “secretly orchestrated a scheme to supracompetitively impact the price levels of broadcast television spot advertisements by agreeing to fix prices and exchange competitively sensitive historic, current, and forward-looking sales data.” The matters were consolidated before an Illinois federal court and in 2019 an amended complaint was filed that added defendants and incorporated allegations from the DOJ’s complaint against the major broadcasters over their sharing of advertising data. (The DOJ’s matter was resolved via two separate settlements.)

A massive amount of information was analyzed during discovery, according to the filing that’s embedded below, including more than 14 million documents produced by defendants and 1.4 million pages of telephone records from companies that were subpoenaed, including AT&T and Verizon.

CBS began its settlement talks in the summer of 2021 and reached a deal in principle by the end of that year. The final agreement was executed earlier this month and the company agreed to pay $5 million. Fox’s negotiations followed a similar timeline and it will pay $6 million. The lion’s share of the settlement, $37 million, will be paid by Cox. Their settlement talks didn’t begin until a January 2022 mediation, but they reached agreement on key terms of a deal the following month.

If approved by the court, the settlement fund will be allocated based on how much a class member spent on TV ads during the relevant time period.

The parties are also asking the U.S. District Judge Virginia M. Kendall to approve the settlement class, which is defined as: “All persons and entities in the United States who purchased broadcast television spot advertising directly from one or more Broadcaster Defendants in a designated market area (‘DMA’) within which two or more of the Broadcaster Defendants sold broadcast television spot advertisements on broadcast television stations, including anyone who directly paid one or more Defendants for all or a portion of the cost of such broadcast television spot advertisements from January 1, 2014 to and including December 31, 2018 (the ‘Settlement Class Period’).” (This excludes defendants, their affiliated companies, officers, directors, employees, and immediate family members of these excluded entities, as well as the federal government.)

A status hearing is currently set for July 21.

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