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Episode 156
The Hidden Cost of Media Flighting
Most brands pile spend into peak weeks. But higher CPMs, more clutter and faster saturation mean you're often paying more to reach the same people.
This episode, Elena, Angela, and VP of Media Analytics Jordan Rossler dig into media flighting: why it became the default, where the strategy breaks down, and what the data says about marginal ROI. They also tackle why shoulder weeks often outperform peak ones, when always-on advertising makes more sense, and how upfronts can quietly undermine the efficiency they promise.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] Why media flighting became standard marketing practice.
• [04:00] The difference between blended and marginal ROI explained.
• [07:30] What happens to TV performance when spend spikes in a short window.
• [11:00] When always-on advertising beats a flighting strategy.
• [14:00] How upfronts add rigidity to media planning.
• [16:00] When flighting does make sense for your brand.
• [17:30] How to build a 2026 media plan that's both impactful and measurable.
Resources:
2026 Digiday Article
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
CMO
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Jordan Rossler
VP Media Analytics
Transcript
Angela: Peak weeks usually mean higher CPMs, they usually mean more clutter, faster saturation, and you're not necessarily buying more incremental reach.
You're just buying more frequency against the same people at a higher cost.
And some of those people were gonna buy anyway.
Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects.
Angela: Hello.
Elena: Hello.
And we're joined by Jordan Rossler, our Vice President of Media Analytics at Marketing Architects.
Jordan: Hey guys. Thanks for having me.
Angela: Hey Jordan, welcome back.
Elena: Thanks for
Jordan: Yeah, good to be back.
Elena: We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. And today we're talking about media flighting, or when you run advertising in planned bursts. So you turn it on for a period of time and turn it back off, and turn it back on again.
This is usually around key moments like holidays, product launches, or promotions. It's a very typical marketing practice, but is it effective? That is what we're going to discuss today. I'll kick us off, as I always do, with some research. And this episode was inspired by an article we read by Keen Decision Systems for Digiday. The article is titled How a Precise Timing Structure Drives Material Differences in Marketing Efficiency.
And it describes how most brands know they need to invest around certain tentpole moments like Prime Day, back-to-school , holidays. The hard part isn't when to spend, it's how much to spend during the peak versus the weeks around it.
This article argues that most marketers look at ROI, or their total return. But what really matters is marginal ROI , or what you get from the next dollar spent. That's where inefficiencies start showing up. So in this article, they talk about using data from 400 brands and $42 billion in spend, and they compare actual flighted campaigns to a model where the same total budget was redistributed to the weeks with the highest marginal return.
The differences were significant. Linear TV in particular improved dramatically when spend was spread more intelligently across the year, instead of being overloaded into peak weeks. Shoulder weeks, or the weeks before and after big events, often delivered higher marginal returns because there was less saturation overall.
So timing seemed to be strategy. And that leads us to this question: could compressing your spend into big bursts leave money on the table?
I wanna start with just media flighting in general. So Angela , I wanted to ask you, why do you think media flighting has become such a default in marketing? Is this sort of inherited behavior from the past? Is this due to trade promotion calendars? Why do you think it's so popular?
Angela: Yeah, I think it's a mix, but most of it is probably inheritance from the past. You know, almost all marketing used to be organized around these campaigns where you had a product launch, a retail promotion, a holiday push. You built this big creative idea and you ran it hard, and then it went dark.
At that time, we were living in a world of very limited channels, long production cycles, and pretty blunt measurement. So media was bought in chunks, creative was built in chunks, and that spending then happened in chunks. And over time, I think that operational model became institutional habit for marketers.
And then retail calendars made it worse, right? Kind of reinforced it—back-to-school , Black Friday, tax season. Brands learned to concentrate spend around these tentpole moments because that's when sales spiked. And finance teams liked it because it aligned media dollars to these revenue peaks, which I'm sure we'll get into.
Elena: So what do you think brands— I mean, they wouldn't be doing this if they didn't believe they were gaining something from it. Like, what do you think they're gaining, and where do you think that might sometimes not be reality?
Angela: Yeah, I think brands believe they're gaining impact through that concentration. The logic is something like, if we can press our spend into a short window, we'll dominate the attention during that time. We'll create urgency. We're gonna own the moment.
And so it feels powerful to show up big in those moments. And I think too, there's financial comfort to it. If sales spike during a holiday or a promotion, then concentrating that spend around that window feels efficient—like you're just aligning the dollars to the demand, right?
But from an attribution standpoint, that can become complicated. But I think it looks cleaner—you turn it on, your sales move, and then you turn it off.
I think the belief starts to break down when everyone else is doing the same thing. Peak weeks usually mean higher CPMs, they usually mean more clutter, faster saturation, and you're not necessarily buying more incremental reach.
You're just buying more frequency against the same people at a higher cost. And some of those people were gonna buy anyway. So what feels like dominance can actually be diminishing returns.
It can feel successful, but it might not be. And I think another place it breaks down is in memory. Brands grow through that mental availability. And if you disappear for long stretches, you're not building or refreshing those memory structures.
Rather, you're letting them decay, and then you have to pay more later to rebuild them. So concentration can create short-term noise, but it can undermine that long-term efficiency if you're not careful.
Elena: Yeah, I remember when we talked with Dale Harrison at Brandweek . He showed that graph of how quickly memory declines, and it was spooky. It's like pretty quick after turning off your advertising, a lot of those brand awareness metrics just drop.
Jordan, thank you again for joining us. You're really a great guest for this topic because you have expertise in both media and analytics, and specifically in TV. So I wanted to start there. Angela talked a little bit about these sort of peak weeks, and I'm curious—from a media buying perspective, what happens to effectiveness when everyone sort of piles into those weeks to buy media?
Jordan: Yeah, typically to be able to pile in, you're competing against a lot of people for that media supply. And so the increased demand increases the price to clear. So CPMs and media pricing just inherently go up, which eats into your efficiency and effectiveness—unless your effectiveness is also really jumping up and getting a boost in those weeks as well.
So you really need to be cognizant of what the landscape is doing, and is your peak week aligned with a lot of other brands, which will inherently increase the demand to be on in those weeks.
Elena: It's gotta be really worth it if you're gonna invest during that time.
So the article talked about marginal ROI and why that matters more than what they called blended ROI. When brands are deciding whether they should keep spending on media, could you explain how they're looking at marginal ROI in simple terms?
Jordan: Yeah, I would say most simply it's the ROI of your most recent dollar—or maybe thinking forward, the ROI of your next dollar. Rather than saying, what's my total revenue over all the total dollars I've spent?
You can get kind of a jaded view if those initial dollars were really strong—your all-in numbers still look really strong, but you might be hardly getting any incremental return.
We know there's a lot of diminishing return in marketing, and so that marginal ROI kind of says, what have my most recent dollars been doing? Is it still worth it for me to be on right now? Or are we actually losing money and getting really soft performance on our most incremental budget?
Elena: So then when you look at real TV campaigns, what typically happens to those marginal returns as spend increases in a short window?
Jordan: Yeah, typically a sharp increase in spend results in much softer performance. I will say the caveat—the exception—is if you are a really seasonal brand or you have that massive peak, and you're able to pour fuel on the fire with those media dollars in that peak spend.
You can offset the expected diminishing returns there, and it truly is fuel on the fire. But generally speaking, unless you have a great business case or seasonality case to be spiking spend, it'll almost always result in softer performance.
Elena: So if I was a brand and I'm overloading spend in peak weeks, what should I look for in the data to evaluate that?
Jordan: Yeah, the marginal dollars are the key to answering that question. Those would likely be performing softly relative to other weeks if your dollars weren't working.
I will say though, measuring the actual effect and impact of those dollars is extremely difficult. These weeks just kind of give us a headache because business is spiking, all other channel spend is spiking, industry and category spend is spiking.
So trying to isolate the impact of Channel X is really, really tough. All the attribution models that are click-based or MTA-based are all gonna look good because of the insane number of clicks, leads, and orders coming in.
So trying to isolate it with some sort of geo or holdout test—where you can truly do an A/B comparison—is really the only way to evaluate incrementality.
Elena: It sounds like it's hard to measure.
So speaking of shoulder weeks, the article found that the time leading up to and following big TV moments performed better than the peak itself. Do you think that's a proof point for more always-on advertising?
Jordan: Yeah, it's a great question. It's honestly very complicated because it depends on your category and consumer behavior.
But here's what we do know: linear TV's mass reach doesn't go away during shoulder weeks or always-on campaigns. So if that's your north star—brand awareness—being on during less competitive weeks is a net win.
However, for brands with massive seasonal demand, it's very hard to pull that demand forward. Consumer behavior is slow-moving—like turning a barge.
You need to look at it holistically: how many dollars did we spend before and during the peak, and did pre-spend prime the pump?
Angela: I would say too, if your product is sold all year, you don't want to only spend during holiday months. It's more efficient to be on as much as possible because you're building mental availability, which helps during peak season.
Jordan: Yeah, 100% agree. Your spend should mirror your demand throughout the year.
Elena: That makes sense.
But TV isn't known for being flexible. How do things like upfronts complicate an always-on strategy?
Angela: It introduces rigidity into what should be a marginal return conversation. Brands commit dollars months in advance to secure pricing and inventory.
But once those dollars are committed, there's pressure to use them in predictable high-profile windows.
The irony is upfronts are meant to drive efficiency, but if they reduce flexibility and push peak-heavy planning, they can erode that efficiency.
Elena: Yeah, that's a good point.
So what conditions would justify going dark and using a flighting strategy?
Jordan: If you have a limited budget and need measurable impact, condensing spend into a shorter period can help generate a detectable signal. Especially for brands new to TV.
Angela: Also if your business is episodic. And during big seasons, you can still allocate a portion of budget to learning—like geo tests—so you improve over time.
Elena: So if you were building a 2026 media plan, how would you approach it?
Jordan: If I'm new to TV, I'd run a two- to three-month test to gauge incrementality. If it works, expand to evergreen.
If I'm established, I'd recommend always-on, then scale during peak seasons—without overpaying to the point where you cancel out gains.
Angela: Anchor yourself in sustained efficient reach, then layer in strategic pulses to amplify demand.
Elena: So the answer is—it depends.
All right, let's wrap with something fun. What is something you refuse to pay peak pricing for?
Jordan: Baby stuff. I recently became a dad five months ago, and people give so much away on Marketplace.
Angela: Mine would be airfare and vacations.
Elena: Sometimes that's hard to predict though.
Angela: I just avoid going when everyone else goes.
Elena: Mine is art. I buy it on Facebook Marketplace. I can't tell the difference between expensive and not, so I'm not paying full price.
Angela: Online garage sailing —it's a game changer.
Elena: Awesome. All right, Jordan, thanks again for joining us.
Jordan: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Episode 156
The Hidden Cost of Media Flighting
Most brands pile spend into peak weeks. But higher CPMs, more clutter and faster saturation mean you're often paying more to reach the same people.
This episode, Elena, Angela, and VP of Media Analytics Jordan Rossler dig into media flighting: why it became the default, where the strategy breaks down, and what the data says about marginal ROI. They also tackle why shoulder weeks often outperform peak ones, when always-on advertising makes more sense, and how upfronts can quietly undermine the efficiency they promise.
Topics Covered
• [01:00] Why media flighting became standard marketing practice.
• [04:00] The difference between blended and marginal ROI explained.
• [07:30] What happens to TV performance when spend spikes in a short window.
• [11:00] When always-on advertising beats a flighting strategy.
• [14:00] How upfronts add rigidity to media planning.
• [16:00] When flighting does make sense for your brand.
• [17:30] How to build a 2026 media plan that's both impactful and measurable.
Resources:
2026 Digiday Article
Today's Hosts
Elena Jasper
CMO
Angela Voss
Chief Executive Officer
Jordan Rossler
VP Media Analytics
Subscribe on
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Transcript
Angela: Peak weeks usually mean higher CPMs, they usually mean more clutter, faster saturation, and you're not necessarily buying more incremental reach.
You're just buying more frequency against the same people at a higher cost.
And some of those people were gonna buy anyway.
Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects.
Angela: Hello.
Elena: Hello.
And we're joined by Jordan Rossler, our Vice President of Media Analytics at Marketing Architects.
Jordan: Hey guys. Thanks for having me.
Angela: Hey Jordan, welcome back.
Elena: Thanks for
Jordan: Yeah, good to be back.
Elena: We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. And today we're talking about media flighting, or when you run advertising in planned bursts. So you turn it on for a period of time and turn it back off, and turn it back on again.
This is usually around key moments like holidays, product launches, or promotions. It's a very typical marketing practice, but is it effective? That is what we're going to discuss today. I'll kick us off, as I always do, with some research. And this episode was inspired by an article we read by Keen Decision Systems for Digiday. The article is titled How a Precise Timing Structure Drives Material Differences in Marketing Efficiency.
And it describes how most brands know they need to invest around certain tentpole moments like Prime Day, back-to-school , holidays. The hard part isn't when to spend, it's how much to spend during the peak versus the weeks around it.
This article argues that most marketers look at ROI, or their total return. But what really matters is marginal ROI , or what you get from the next dollar spent. That's where inefficiencies start showing up. So in this article, they talk about using data from 400 brands and $42 billion in spend, and they compare actual flighted campaigns to a model where the same total budget was redistributed to the weeks with the highest marginal return.
The differences were significant. Linear TV in particular improved dramatically when spend was spread more intelligently across the year, instead of being overloaded into peak weeks. Shoulder weeks, or the weeks before and after big events, often delivered higher marginal returns because there was less saturation overall.
So timing seemed to be strategy. And that leads us to this question: could compressing your spend into big bursts leave money on the table?
I wanna start with just media flighting in general. So Angela , I wanted to ask you, why do you think media flighting has become such a default in marketing? Is this sort of inherited behavior from the past? Is this due to trade promotion calendars? Why do you think it's so popular?
Angela: Yeah, I think it's a mix, but most of it is probably inheritance from the past. You know, almost all marketing used to be organized around these campaigns where you had a product launch, a retail promotion, a holiday push. You built this big creative idea and you ran it hard, and then it went dark.
At that time, we were living in a world of very limited channels, long production cycles, and pretty blunt measurement. So media was bought in chunks, creative was built in chunks, and that spending then happened in chunks. And over time, I think that operational model became institutional habit for marketers.
And then retail calendars made it worse, right? Kind of reinforced it—back-to-school , Black Friday, tax season. Brands learned to concentrate spend around these tentpole moments because that's when sales spiked. And finance teams liked it because it aligned media dollars to these revenue peaks, which I'm sure we'll get into.
Elena: So what do you think brands— I mean, they wouldn't be doing this if they didn't believe they were gaining something from it. Like, what do you think they're gaining, and where do you think that might sometimes not be reality?
Angela: Yeah, I think brands believe they're gaining impact through that concentration. The logic is something like, if we can press our spend into a short window, we'll dominate the attention during that time. We'll create urgency. We're gonna own the moment.
And so it feels powerful to show up big in those moments. And I think too, there's financial comfort to it. If sales spike during a holiday or a promotion, then concentrating that spend around that window feels efficient—like you're just aligning the dollars to the demand, right?
But from an attribution standpoint, that can become complicated. But I think it looks cleaner—you turn it on, your sales move, and then you turn it off.
I think the belief starts to break down when everyone else is doing the same thing. Peak weeks usually mean higher CPMs, they usually mean more clutter, faster saturation, and you're not necessarily buying more incremental reach.
You're just buying more frequency against the same people at a higher cost. And some of those people were gonna buy anyway. So what feels like dominance can actually be diminishing returns.
It can feel successful, but it might not be. And I think another place it breaks down is in memory. Brands grow through that mental availability. And if you disappear for long stretches, you're not building or refreshing those memory structures.
Rather, you're letting them decay, and then you have to pay more later to rebuild them. So concentration can create short-term noise, but it can undermine that long-term efficiency if you're not careful.
Elena: Yeah, I remember when we talked with Dale Harrison at Brandweek . He showed that graph of how quickly memory declines, and it was spooky. It's like pretty quick after turning off your advertising, a lot of those brand awareness metrics just drop.
Jordan, thank you again for joining us. You're really a great guest for this topic because you have expertise in both media and analytics, and specifically in TV. So I wanted to start there. Angela talked a little bit about these sort of peak weeks, and I'm curious—from a media buying perspective, what happens to effectiveness when everyone sort of piles into those weeks to buy media?
Jordan: Yeah, typically to be able to pile in, you're competing against a lot of people for that media supply. And so the increased demand increases the price to clear. So CPMs and media pricing just inherently go up, which eats into your efficiency and effectiveness—unless your effectiveness is also really jumping up and getting a boost in those weeks as well.
So you really need to be cognizant of what the landscape is doing, and is your peak week aligned with a lot of other brands, which will inherently increase the demand to be on in those weeks.
Elena: It's gotta be really worth it if you're gonna invest during that time.
So the article talked about marginal ROI and why that matters more than what they called blended ROI. When brands are deciding whether they should keep spending on media, could you explain how they're looking at marginal ROI in simple terms?
Jordan: Yeah, I would say most simply it's the ROI of your most recent dollar—or maybe thinking forward, the ROI of your next dollar. Rather than saying, what's my total revenue over all the total dollars I've spent?
You can get kind of a jaded view if those initial dollars were really strong—your all-in numbers still look really strong, but you might be hardly getting any incremental return.
We know there's a lot of diminishing return in marketing, and so that marginal ROI kind of says, what have my most recent dollars been doing? Is it still worth it for me to be on right now? Or are we actually losing money and getting really soft performance on our most incremental budget?
Elena: So then when you look at real TV campaigns, what typically happens to those marginal returns as spend increases in a short window?
Jordan: Yeah, typically a sharp increase in spend results in much softer performance. I will say the caveat—the exception—is if you are a really seasonal brand or you have that massive peak, and you're able to pour fuel on the fire with those media dollars in that peak spend.
You can offset the expected diminishing returns there, and it truly is fuel on the fire. But generally speaking, unless you have a great business case or seasonality case to be spiking spend, it'll almost always result in softer performance.
Elena: So if I was a brand and I'm overloading spend in peak weeks, what should I look for in the data to evaluate that?
Jordan: Yeah, the marginal dollars are the key to answering that question. Those would likely be performing softly relative to other weeks if your dollars weren't working.
I will say though, measuring the actual effect and impact of those dollars is extremely difficult. These weeks just kind of give us a headache because business is spiking, all other channel spend is spiking, industry and category spend is spiking.
So trying to isolate the impact of Channel X is really, really tough. All the attribution models that are click-based or MTA-based are all gonna look good because of the insane number of clicks, leads, and orders coming in.
So trying to isolate it with some sort of geo or holdout test—where you can truly do an A/B comparison—is really the only way to evaluate incrementality.
Elena: It sounds like it's hard to measure.
So speaking of shoulder weeks, the article found that the time leading up to and following big TV moments performed better than the peak itself. Do you think that's a proof point for more always-on advertising?
Jordan: Yeah, it's a great question. It's honestly very complicated because it depends on your category and consumer behavior.
But here's what we do know: linear TV's mass reach doesn't go away during shoulder weeks or always-on campaigns. So if that's your north star—brand awareness—being on during less competitive weeks is a net win.
However, for brands with massive seasonal demand, it's very hard to pull that demand forward. Consumer behavior is slow-moving—like turning a barge.
You need to look at it holistically: how many dollars did we spend before and during the peak, and did pre-spend prime the pump?
Angela: I would say too, if your product is sold all year, you don't want to only spend during holiday months. It's more efficient to be on as much as possible because you're building mental availability, which helps during peak season.
Jordan: Yeah, 100% agree. Your spend should mirror your demand throughout the year.
Elena: That makes sense.
But TV isn't known for being flexible. How do things like upfronts complicate an always-on strategy?
Angela: It introduces rigidity into what should be a marginal return conversation. Brands commit dollars months in advance to secure pricing and inventory.
But once those dollars are committed, there's pressure to use them in predictable high-profile windows.
The irony is upfronts are meant to drive efficiency, but if they reduce flexibility and push peak-heavy planning, they can erode that efficiency.
Elena: Yeah, that's a good point.
So what conditions would justify going dark and using a flighting strategy?
Jordan: If you have a limited budget and need measurable impact, condensing spend into a shorter period can help generate a detectable signal. Especially for brands new to TV.
Angela: Also if your business is episodic. And during big seasons, you can still allocate a portion of budget to learning—like geo tests—so you improve over time.
Elena: So if you were building a 2026 media plan, how would you approach it?
Jordan: If I'm new to TV, I'd run a two- to three-month test to gauge incrementality. If it works, expand to evergreen.
If I'm established, I'd recommend always-on, then scale during peak seasons—without overpaying to the point where you cancel out gains.
Angela: Anchor yourself in sustained efficient reach, then layer in strategic pulses to amplify demand.
Elena: So the answer is—it depends.
All right, let's wrap with something fun. What is something you refuse to pay peak pricing for?
Jordan: Baby stuff. I recently became a dad five months ago, and people give so much away on Marketplace.
Angela: Mine would be airfare and vacations.
Elena: Sometimes that's hard to predict though.
Angela: I just avoid going when everyone else goes.
Elena: Mine is art. I buy it on Facebook Marketplace. I can't tell the difference between expensive and not, so I'm not paying full price.
Angela: Online garage sailing —it's a game changer.
Elena: Awesome. All right, Jordan, thanks again for joining us.
Jordan: Yeah, thanks for having me.