Media Buying
Spot Television
Denotes all available commercial advertising time available for purchase from a local television station, encompassing both local and national spots.
What is Spot Television?
Spot Television refers to inventory bought on individual local TV stations rather than through a national network upfront. A national advertiser who wants presence in specific DMAs — say, ten high-priority metros rather than the full national footprint — uses Spot TV to assemble a custom station-by-station buy. Local advertisers, of course, use Spot TV as their default medium.
Spot TV buying requires station-level intelligence that national buying does not: which stations dominate which dayparts, how local programming affects adjacency value, which affiliates have the strongest news brands. Modern intelligence platforms make station-level pattern recognition dramatically easier than it was in the manual-workflow era, when Spot TV buyers relied on relationships and spreadsheets.
Why it matters
Differentiated from network television buys, spot television allows advertisers to surgically target specific geographic markets without paying for national reach.
Related terms
- Adjacency— An advertising pod positioned immediately next to a specific, high-value program feature, such as a weather report or sports update.
- Avail (Availability)— Unsold units of commercial time available for broadcasters to sell to prospective advertisers.
- Co-op Advertising (Co-operative)— An arrangement where a major product manufacturer financially subsidizes the advertising costs of a local retailer promoting their specific product.
- Daypart— The specific time segments into which a broadcast day is divided for the purpose of selling advertising time (e.