This week in charts
Consumer spending
A shortage of workers?
Inflation – Canada vs. the world
Canadian housing affordability
ESG
Microsoft Poised to Sit Out TV’s Upfront Market
The technology giant has been telling TV networks and media buyers that it intends to bypass TV’s annual haggle for commercial inventory, according to four executives familiar with recent discussions. The company behind such products and services as Windows, LinkedIn, the Halo video games and Surface tablets instead favors taking its chances in what is known as TV’s “scatter” market, the purchase of ad time bought closer to run date.
Microsoft seems to feel that it needs to be cautious in trying to sell consumers expensive hardware and other tech goods at a time when the stock market is churning, according to two of these executives, and when people may be fretting about loosening their purse strings. Each year, as part of the upfront, U.S. TV networks try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory in advance, and advertisers who do so can lock in prices in case they rise later in the year.
Microsoft spent around $294.8 million on TV advertising in 2021, according to Kantar, a tracker of ad spending. Of that amount, the bulk — around $164.2 million — went to broadcast TV, with another nearly $128 million earmarked for cable TV. Microsoft spent around $2.7 million on Spanish-language TV in 2021, according to Kantar. One media buyer suggested any decision by Microsoft to bump spending would likely affect TV’s sports-advertising market, where the tech giant is a regular customer.
This week’s fun finds
If the world was made up of 100 people, what would the breakdown be?
A Stanford Psychologist Says He’s Cracked the Code of One-Hit Wonders
Berg compiled a data set of more than 3 million songs released from 1959 to 2010 and pulled out the biggest hits. He used an algorithm developed by the company EchoNest to measure the songs’ sonic features, including key, tempo, and danceability. This allowed him to quantify how similar a given hit is to the contemporary popular-music landscape (which he calls “novelty”), and the musical diversity of an artist’s body of work (“variety”).
“Novelty is a double-edged sword,” Berg told me. “Being very different from the mainstream is really, really bad for your likelihood of initially making a hit when you’re not well known. But once you have a hit, novelty suddenly becomes a huge asset that is likely to sustain your success.” Mass audiences are drawn to what’s familiar, but they become loyal to what’s consistently distinct.
