From Adage:
Sumner Redstone must be wondering what he’s hearing. At one of his media companies, Viacom, executives are openly fretting about “scatter,” the ad time sold closer to air date that typically serves as a barometer for marketers’ TV demand. And at the other, CBS Corp., CEO Les Moonves recently told investors that “scatter” demand is just fine.
So are advertisers facing a softening ad market or do they still have to grapple with the tough premiums they’ve been paying for the last few years?
Concern is palpable. With the U.S. still mired in a sluggish economy, advertisers’ willingness to spend may well hinge on consumers’ ability to buy the goods they hawk. “U.S. advertising trends have been decelerating over 2011 and came in below forecast for the second quarter in a row,” Nomura Securities analyst Michael Nathanson said in a research note Monday. “We are worried that national scatter trends, a major source of upside, have cooled and will become even more challenging in the first quarter,” he said.
While CBS said it believes its recent prime-time performance will help it snare the lion’s share of scatter spending, other media outlets have not been as ebullient. Sister corporation Viacom suggested the market for “scatter” was softening compared to past quarters. AMC Networks last week reinforced that view, noting that sponsors were waiting longer than they had in the past to put down money on scatter advertising. Walt Disney also suggested that scatter demand has “slowed.”
