Entertainment media companies are reporting record upfront sales this year, locking in billions in advertising commitments months in advance of their newest shows.

But when it comes to advertisers buying ad inventory as they go, it’s a different story.

What’s going on? The scatter market—i.e., all the ad inventory on TV and streaming platforms not bought during the upfronts—is slowing down. According to the Standard Media Index, scatter-market investment in the second quarter of 2022 declined 15% compared to a year prior.

In recent weeks, executives across the industry have warned investors of rough waters ahead.

• “It’s true that there are some challenges in the scatter market and in digital, and that really is, as you would guess, driven by the state of the macroeconomic environment,” Paramount CEO Bob Bakish told investors earlier this month.
• NBCUniversal, which just a month ago was celebrating its highest-grossing upfront since it was acquired by Comcast, was experiencing a “choppy” advertising market and lower year over year scatter sales, CEO Jeff Shell told investors in late July.
• Meanwhile, Roku, which reported a record $1 billion in upfront ad sales, released a letter to shareholders acknowledging that advertisers were “significantly” curtailing spend in the scatter market.

“We are seeing advertisers worried about a possible recession, and so we’re seeing them reduce their spend in places that are easy for them to turn off and turn back on,” Roku CEO Anthony Wood told investors late last month when it reported lower-than-expected Q2 revenue growth. “The scatter market, which is an important source of ad revenue for Roku—it’s an easy market for advertisers to turn off and turn back on.”

The effects are uneven across advertising sectors, though, and not all media companies are feeling the scatter-related sting. Keep reading here.—KS

Is the DTC renaissance over? If so, it seems like no one told Fishwife and Graza.

The tinned-fish company and the squeezy olive-oil upstart, both DTCs, recently teamed up for a cobranded product, with both brands promoting it across their respective channels.

Zoom in: The product in question is Campfire Cod, a smoked cod tinned in Graza’s signature “sizzle” olive oil (another DTC brand called Diaspora also contributed its single-origin Aranya black pepper to the product, but it wasn’t involved in the marketing push from Graza and Fishwife, per Fishwife co-founder Becca Millstein).

Both brands have been growing like olives fish weeds since they debuted:

• Fishwife grew 54% between Q1 and Q2 this year, and the company said it’s “on track for triple-digit year over year growth.” According to Millstein, it only recently started testing paid advertising via Facebook and Google.
• Ahead of its debut earlier this year, Graza leaned on an untraditional social strategy that helped it gain website conversions, followers, and social engagement within seven days of its official rollout.

Marketing Brew sat down with Millstein to pull back the curtain on the partnership. Click here to read more about it.—PB

At first glance, the future of live shopping may look bleak.

• Just this summer, in addition to Meta’s announcement that live shopping on Facebook would end in October, TikTok backed off from plans to expand livestream shopping capabilities to the US.
• Amazon, which launched live shopping in 2019, has found limited success as influencers have struggled to bring their social media followings to the platform.

And if the titans of tech can’t do it, who can? China, for one. According to estimates from Insider Intelligence, live streaming generated $300 billion by June 2021. But Vincent Yang, who co-founded live shopping platform Firework, is convinced live shopping will have its moment in the spotlight in the United States too.

Yang isn’t alone in his faith in live shopping: Investors are on board too, and don’t seem to be deterred by Facebook’s change of heart.

• “The larger platforms pulling back, in my mind, creates more of an opportunity than anything else,” Brian O’Malley, a managing partner at Forerunner Ventures, which has several investments in the live shopping space.

Zarina Lam Stanford, CMO of retail software company Bazaarvoice, explained that while China in particular “killed it” at live shopping, brands in the US are learning how to make it right for their consumers, who want the experience that live shopping offers.

“Gen Z and Gen Alpha—or the ‘social natives’ as we call them—are really shaping everything,” she explained to Retail Brew. “They want experiential. They want real time. 80% of them prefer to watch videos rather than reading…about a product.”

Read the full story on Retail Brew.—MA

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Get it right: Eight factors to take into account when conducting original research.

Change is good: A look at how video consumption habits are evolving this year.

Gotta start somewhere: Level up your SEO strategy with these 11 steps.

Help us out, and you might score a cool $250: All you gotta do is take this quick survey. It’ll help us improve our brand-partnerships game, and you’ll be entered in a raffle to win a $250 AmEx gift card.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Consumer behaviors are changing rapidly. Join us for a can’t-miss discussion about how every marketer should be navigating major shifts in the digital landscape.

Watch the on-demand webinar now.

The original pumpkin drink.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Why brands and agencies are hiring TikTok creators
• For Walmart, a streamer deal could bolster its growing ad biz
• Major publishers are buying ads in ‘Subway Surfers’ to juice traffic