This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how last year’s upfront negotiations and the past year’s scatter market have created the conditions for the power balance in this year’s upfront negotiations to be more even than in the past two years.
Scattering the upfront dynamic
The key hits:
- Amid a softening scatter ad market, TV network owners may look to lock up more linear inventory in this year’s upfront negotiations.
- After TV networks pushed away linear dollars in last year’s upfront, buyers and sellers expected the result to be a tight scatter market that never materialized.
- Supply chain issues and rising inflation and interest rates have contributed to scatter advertiser demand falling short of expectations.
A softer-than-expected scatter TV ad market in the past year is putting a twist on this year’s TV advertising upfront market. TV network owners may look to lock up more of their linear TV inventory in this year’s upfront market to avoid leaving money on the table, which could have the effect of mitigating price increases and tightening up the scatter TV market in the fall, according to executives at TV networks and agencies.
“The softness in scatter has continued, which means we have lost a little bit of confidence and swagger and are a little bit more concerned about filling the respective buckets — which we only have one shot at doing this time of year,” said one TV network executive.
“The networks, I believe, are going to sell more in this upfront because they know that they got burned in the scatter marketplace. So there will be more inventory available to purchase,” said one agency executive.
By pushing away linear TV dollars in last year’s upfront, TV network owners bet on making up the money — and then some — in the scatter market. But that bet didn’t exactly pay off. Advertiser demand didn’t overwhelm the supply of traditional TV inventory available in the scatter market to the extent that buyers…