Premier SV, for instance, purchased all the commercial time on ORT for 12 months, garnering the exclusive right to broker that time. Their success is probably due to good personal relationships with top management in the industry, and the fact that they offered serious and large contracts when TV stations needed cash. Although many in the television and advertising industries would like to break the ad brokerages' grip on the market, confronting the now-established order can have mortal consequences, as the murder of former ORT chief Vladislav Listev made clear. Listev was killed shortly after announcing a six-month moratorium on the purchase of advertising on ORT because of suspected corruption. The actual profits brought in by the ad brokers are not known and because of a lack of disclosure requirements, will never be public knowledge.
Profits are certainly high, however.
The head of one Moscow advertising agency has said that it is ridiculous that ad brokers should have higher profits than the companies they serve. Many claim that the sale of national television advertising was for its first several years an opaque process and highly corrupt. Some believe that these decisions are more and more based on business considerations, as companies that hire ad agencies demand more responsibility and accountability from their business partners. Others say, however, that while the market may becoming more efficient, it is no more transparent now than it was before, and there is no reason to believe that it will change in the near future. The future role of the ad brokers is however not clear.