Scatter vs Upfront TV: Which One Should You Choose Next Season?
Choosing where to spend your TV ad money, in Upfront TV market or the scatter market, can sometimes be a daunting task. However, the decisioning process doesn’t have to feel like you’re in Mission Impossible, trying to race against the clock against an enemy to save the world. Instead, it should be a well-informed and strategic choice that can greatly impact the success of your TV ad campaign.
Here’s what you need to know about scatter vs upfront:
What is scatter TV?
In advertising, scatter TV refers to purchasing airtime on television networks outside the upfront market. This means that advertisers are buying ad space closer to the actual date of airing, as opposed to securing it far in advance during the annual upfront negotiations with networks. Consequently, the scatter market enables advertisers to be more flexible with their ad budgets and placements.
There are many reasons someone might want to do this.
- Advertisers might have a remaining budget exclusively dedicated to scatter advertising.
- Alternatively, they might be looking for a good balance between flexibility, building brand awareness, and driving performance (i.e., reaching a large audience with Upfront ads and finding pools of audience unreached by the Upfront buys and running performance or brandformance advertising in the scatter market).
- Advertisers may also want to take precautions against an unpredictable market. Scatter allows you to be more flexible and move your ad budget around to react to market changes, product delays, and brand conditions.
In any case, the scatter market works differently than the upfront one, which is precisely why it makes an attractive offering for many brands and is worth considering.
Advantages of scatter TV
The main advantage of scatter TV is that it allows for more flexibility in advertising. Unlike the upfront market, where networks offer discounts to sell ad slots as far as one year in advance (in exchange for an annual spend commitment,) scatter TV offers advertisers the ability to buy airtime closer to the airing date.
The flexibility of scatter TV makes it easier for brands to adapt their advertising strategies based on current events, company strategy adjustments, or changes in consumer behavior, which can be invaluable for businesses that are testing out the waters with TV advertising.
Unknown to most, scatter TV also provides marketers with a lot of granular audience data to help them pinpoint (and target) strategic audiences beyond age and gender. For example, Simulmedia’s TV+ will help marketers define a richly-defined strategic audience and find the best spots to laser-target them to find relevant new audiences at the most efficient reach.
Additionally, when advertisers buy scatter TV time, they can cherry-pick when their ads will be shown as well (At Simulmedia, we can do this down to the smallest details, like the hour at which the ad airs.) And while this might not have been true back in the day, automation now makes it easier for businesses to scale and measure their ad performance in the scatter market and adopt an always-on scatter approach that mimics the scale of an upfront buy but with the added benefits of flexibility and, with the right technology, reach efficiency.
Last but not least, advertisers benefit from the flexibility to tweak creative campaign elements closer to the broadcast date on the scatter market. Since scatter advertising often utilizes unsold network airtime, it can offer a cost-effective advertising solution.
Disadvantages of scatter TV
Scatter TV also poses some disadvantages – or at least it used to (as most of them have been overcome by technology.) In general, they revolve around the potential for unfulfilled advertising goals.
Back in the day, if advertisers were not buying in bulk during the upfront market, they could have ended up paying higher CPMs for scatter TV airtime. Additionally, scatter advertising used to be difficult to scale and provided no control over which daypart your money would buy.
Most of these issues are now over. You can now target your scatter ads with significantly more control, measure the cost to reach your strategic audience and scale. In the end, there’s no way to avoid spending media reaching people outside of your target audience in a 1-to-n broadcast market, but what’s important is that you’ve got control to choose the venues that maximize unduplicated target audience reach while minimizing the cost of reaching them.
Data and technology for scatter TV
In linear TV, automated buying technology can help advertisers tap into the scatter market, even at the very last minute, and with maximum flexibility and efficiency. This type of technology is, if you will, similar to what you would use in digital marketing for programmatic advertising.
Automated buying of scatter TV allows advertisers to use data and technology to target their audience more precisely, ensuring they get the most out of their scatter TV budget. It also determines avails in real-time and leverages pre-negotiated scatter rates – all the information you need to construct a media plan that optimizes cost-efficient reach while managing frequency. Finally, it actually automates sending the insertion order and negotiating with the publisher.
Ultimately, scatter TV ad automation is a win-win: advertisers get more data-driven TV ads, networks fill in their empty ad spaces quicker and on short notice, and consumers are likelier to see ads that help them find products they like.
What is upfront TV?
Upfront TV refers to the more traditional method of buying ad space far in advance, usually during late spring to early summer, for placement in the Q4 to Q3 schedules of the following year. During upfront negotiations, networks sell a significant portion of their advertising inventory for the upcoming year to advertisers.
The upfront market amounts to approximately $20 billion (out of the $90 billion spent in the TV space). Trade magazines and websites predict an allegedly dying upfront TV market every year, which does not appear to be true – as upfront spending is predicted to remain high throughout the near future. The decline is real – it’s just that it’s far less of a catastrophic downhill ride than it might seem.
This resilience affords networks the time to adapt the upfront market to the rapidly changing industry and the needs of advertisers. Though a significant amount of money goes into scatter TV advertising, especially in uncertain times, the upfronts remain a substantial part of the industry.
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Advantages of upfront TV
The main advantage of upfront TV is that advertisers commit to a guaranteed ad placement, often at discounted rates. Advertisers expend less effort to secure big media buys, while networks have an ensured source of revenue and a way to bundle in hard-to-sell placements into a much larger media buy.
Additionally, upfront TV allows brands to secure prime ad space during popular programming, such as major sports events or highly anticipated TV shows. This can be crucial for brands that want maximum exposure and reach for their ads.
Disadvantages of upfront TV
One potential disadvantage of upfront TV is the lack of flexibility. Once the ad space is secured, it typically is difficult to change or adjust based on current events, delays in product launches, or changes in consumer behavior. This inflexibility can be problematic for advertisers who need to adapt their messaging and campaign strategies quickly.
Furthermore, upfront TV might be more suitable for brands with years of experience in advertising on TV, a significant enough media budget to attract networks’ attention, and the knowledge of what guarantees to ask for from the network.
On the network side, fragmented viewership can lead networks to miss their audience guarantees – which means they don’t reach advertisers’ viewership goals within their flight windows. Makegoods and audience deficiency units (ADUs) are a nuisance for both advertisers and networks.
Upfront makes a lot of sense for brands that have extensive experience in how TV advertising works for them – but it may not be a great option for businesses new to TV ads that want a good balance between branding and performance.
Which one should you choose?
Scatter TV vs upfront TV isn't a win-lose battle -- it's a matter of options and choice.
If your business is familiar with TV advertising and seeks to sponsor big live events, such as major sports and award events, then sending a larger chunk of your budget to upfront TV might be the perfect option for you.
Though you relinquish control of the buy to the networks, brands can secure prime ad space in advance and achieve broad scale with less effort. But be aware that the Upfront is seldom the most cost-efficient way to reach a target audience, particularly if the target audience is more narrowly defined than simple age/gender definitions. Also, by focusing spend on a small group of publishers, you may end up driving more frequency than reach overall, annoying viewers.
On the other hand, if flexibility and cost-efficiency are essential factors for your brand, scatter TV might be the right choice. Programmatic-like technology, such as Simulmedia’s TV+, can help make scatter TV even more attractive by targeting the right strategic audience, cherry-picking the most cost-efficient spots to find them with laser-like precision, and executing large-scale media plans through streamlined, highly automated workflows, all while avoiding overfrequency.
In the end, especially for brands with big TV budgets, a combination of both upfront and scatter TV might be the optimal solution for your brand's advertising strategy. Many of Simulmedia’s clients run always-on scatter buys (no Upfront buys) or leverage scatter to incrementally find the audiences they’re not likely to reach in an Upfront buy.
Working with an experienced media buyer can help you navigate the two markets and make educated decisions to reach your target audience effectively. So, if all you’ve done has been Upfronts in the past, don't limit yourself to just one option on autopilot- consider shaving off 20-30% of an upfront budget to spend it in scatter – you’re likely to see greater efficiency and find unreached audiences who would benefit from your products.