Why Scatterbrains Win in Today’s Media Market

By Dick Wechsler, Founder and CEO of LWD

My mother’s greatest frustration – “You’re such a scatterbrain, Dickie!” has finally paid off big time. Given the sudden viewership shifts in the increasingly fragmented video media market, a scatter planning and buying strategy can realize enormous advantages over the traditional buy and play upfront media strategy.

An upfront strategy is a must if the NFL season, playoffs, and Super Bowl are critical to a media plan. But, after that, almost everything can be picked up in the scatter market. As of July 23, the price of Summer Olympic advertising is coming down considerably. There’s a lot of inventory available way below upfront pricing. The flexibility to move money around and take advantage of opportunities like this are a key advantage of a scatter media strategy.

Following the Trump assassination attempt on Saturday, July 7, a flood of viewers tuned into news networks. According to Television News Daily for the week of July 8 through 16, Fox News was +90%, CNN was +90% and MSNBC was +32% in viewership.

Here at Lockard & Wechsler Direct, we saw responsiveness increase over 500% during airings in the news coverage immediately following that Saturday’s events. The flexibility of the scatter market allowed us to immediately shift client investments to these news networks to ride the wave of responsiveness during the following week.

Sudden shifts in viewership are unpredictable, but they are increasingly common. In addition, more and more premium inventory is available because of the shift of budgets from linear and cable to CTV. That makes even more inventory available to scatter strategists.

In today’s media market, it’s good to be a scatterbrain despite what my mother used to say.