Soft Media Market Means Massive Leverage
The 2026 media market is fragmented and soft because sales teams are stretched thinner than ever, platforms are still fighting for market share at the expense of rate discipline, and media is always the first sector to feel an economic slowdown. That pressure creates real opportunities for advertisers, from old school share deals to programmatic inventory that’s quietly underpriced, if you have cash ready and know where to look.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Let’s talk about why it’s soft, then let’s talk about what you can actually do with that.
Why things are fragmented right now
Good sales teams have always been hard to find. That’s not new. What’s new is there’s roughly 100 times as many sales orgs out there now, and probably not 100 times as many actually good salespeople to go around. So either you’ve got a thinner talent pool spread across way more shops, or you’ve got one sales team now responsible for selling a much bigger pie than they used to. Neither version means these places are getting their day in court, so to speak.
The Silicon Valley math. We’re still very much in a market share land grab, and the mindset a lot of these platforms operate under is basically last one standing wins. That means selling inventory at a price that makes no real sense on paper. This isn’t a new game either. Media’s been playing some version of this long before streaming, programmatic, or social ever showed up. It’s just got more players now.
Media always gets hit first. Media is one of the best early warning signs an economy gives you. We see cancellations 2 to 3 months before anybody else feels it, and we’re usually the first ones back when things turn around too. Every single media org has taken a hit this year. Not most. All of them.
Put those three things together and you get a fragmented, jumpy market where a lot of platforms are under real pressure to hit numbers. That pressure is exactly where the opportunity lives.
Where the opportunities actually are
Old school still works, it just looks different now.
Back in the day we used to run share deals all the time. You had a list of people you could call. Put $500K on a spot worth $1,000 so the revenue lands this quarter, and we’ll give you $750K worth of free inventory next quarter to make it even. Transparent to shareholders? We’re not lawyers, but come on. Common practice? Absolutely, and it was a real win for any brand plugged in enough to know it was on the table. If you’ve got spending power and you know who’s sweating their numbers, you have more leverage than you think you do.
Every new thing has its own version. Just a matter of finding it. Relationships still matter in the programmatic world. You just need to know who to have them with. You can cut direct deals with suppliers. You can cut direct deals with media orgs. Most DSPs will let you cut a direct deal and then run it through their platform at the negotiated rate. Or skip the middleman entirely and go direct with basically any vendor. Every sales manager out there is stressed about something right now. Could be a new product they need dollars on. Could be a quarterly number they’re chasing. Could be a big game that’s sold out or dead empty tomorrow night and they need to know which. Doesn’t matter what the specific fire is. If you’ve got cash sitting there, you’ve got leverage over whoever’s putting that fire out.
Even the walled gardens aren’t immune to this. Admittedly, your average local advertiser doesn’t have the kind of leverage over Meta or Google that they might have with a local TV station. But Google and Meta still have inventory that disappears one way or another, sold or unsold, exactly like everybody else’s. We see the same pattern show up even on the most locked down, sterile programmatic stacks. The system throws up “underdelivering, underdelivering,” and then somehow, magically, it’s delivering. To be clear, that’s with us throttling the targeting on our end, not the platform just blasting it out to anyone breathing. But the pattern’s real. 2 minute spots at 30 second rates. Multiple layers of premium targeting suddenly available. It shows up more than people realize.
This isn’t a soft market thing. It’s always a thing.
None of this leverage suddenly appeared because the market got soft this year. Share deals, DSPs racing to spend budget, platforms bending on inventory when someone’s got cash and the willingness to ask, that’s been true in good years and bad ones. A soft market just makes it more obvious and more common, because more platforms are under pressure at the same time. But the underlying game, sales teams having a number they need to hit and being willing to move to hit it, never actually goes away. It’s always the case. A hot market just makes it easier for platforms to hide it.
The catch
None of this is something you should build a strategy on. You can’t build a house out of lumber you found in the bargain bin. In a soft market like this one though, there are real opportunities sitting around for anyone paying attention, with cash ready, and willing to actually pick up the phone.
FAQ: Buying leverage in a soft media market
Why is the media market soft right now? Sales teams across the industry are stretched thin, platforms are still fighting for market share instead of protecting rate, and media tends to feel an economic slowdown before any other sector does. All three combine to put pressure on platforms to hit revenue numbers, which creates room for advertisers to negotiate.
What is a share deal in media buying? A share deal is when a media seller books a discounted or bonus rate on current inventory, then makes up the difference with free or heavily discounted inventory in a future quarter. It’s an old media sales tactic that still shows up in various forms today.
Can you get better rates on programmatic inventory in a soft market? Yes. Signs of a soft programmatic market include longer spots selling at the same CPM as shorter ones, more premium placement becoming available when certain supply sources are turned off, and DSPs pushing to fully spend budgets by the end of a flight date.
Do Google and Meta behave the same way as smaller platforms in a soft market? Individual local advertisers don’t have the same negotiating leverage with Google or Meta that they might have with a local station or network. But their inventory still goes unsold just like anyone else’s, and similar delivery patterns, like a system flagging “underdelivering” and then catching up right before a flight ends, show up even on their platforms.
Let us find your leverage with you
We’ve negotiated over half a billion dollars worth of advertising over our career. We know what a stretched sales team looks like from across the table, we know when a platform is protecting rate versus protecting revenue, and we know where the real room to negotiate is hiding in a market like this one.
If you want someone who’s actually sat on the other side of these deals working your budget instead of guessing, let’s talk.
