upfronts

The streaming services will be looking for a larger share of the $27-billion pot for commercial time in the 2024-25 TV season.

On the eve of its latest quarter earnings release, Disney Advertising has closed its upfront advertising deal-making for the new TV season that starts next month at a revenue volume “in line with the prior year,” according to the company. A year ago, Walt Disney amassed $9 billion from upfront advertising revenue commitments for the 2022-2023 TV season, Disney said.

The owner of the Univision broadcast network and the Vix streaming hub was able to increase the volume of ad commitments it secured in upfront talks, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company expects volume to increase in the high-single-digit percentage range, while most of its English-language rivals are seeing commitment volume that is largely flat to slightly up from year-earlier performance.

CBS and Fox weighed in on their upfronts today, following NBC last week. CBS has closed its 2024 selling season up “low-to-mid single digits” in dollar commitments. Fox Corp. showed gains in news and is looking at a fall slate of sports, animated and unsripted content. Both companies, along with the rest of the television industry, have been in unusually protracted negotiations amid unprecedented Hollywood labor action and a problematic ad market.

To collect ad dollars this year, the nation’s big TV networks did something they rarely do. They held a fire sale. U.S. media companies have largely closed out their “upfront” ad-sales process, according to four executives familiar with recent negotiations, and are likely to see a decline in volume for the first time since the 2020 coronavirus pandemic — and just the second since 2015. These executives said the volume of advertising commitments the networks were able to secure fell in nearly all areas, except sports. And to get there, the networks had to cut their rates.

Tubi, Fox’s free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) service, will host a half-day event for advertisers on March 23 in New York City. Tubi Connect, the platform’s first conference for advertisers, appears timed to grab the attention of brands and agencies before the hectic upfronts commence — including, perhaps, touting that Tubi reached a 1% share of total monthly U.S. TV/video minutes in February, qualifying it for debuting in Nielsen’s monthly tallies.

Night Court, the NBC sitcom that was recently rebooted, enjoyed its heyday after its debut on NBC’s Thursday primetime schedule in 1984. But NBCUniversal is hoping the retooled comedy will lead Madison Avenue into the future. When the original program launched, built around star Harry Anderson as a non-traditional metropolitan judge, NBC sold ads against the debut broadcast of each episode as well as a rerun later in the season. Now, says Mark Marshall, the executive recently given wider oversight over NBCUniversal’s national ad sales, the company is selling broad-reach ads attached to the linear debut of each episode as well as targeted advertising that appears adjacent to the series when it streams on Peacock.

Paramount Global won’t hold forth at New York’s Carnegie Hall during TV’s “upfront” season, signaling some of the many changes taking place in the ways traditional media companies talk to Madison Avenue about matching commercials with content. Paramount, owner of CBS, Nickelodeon and Paramount+, “will be hosting a series of high-impact, intimate gatherings in April for each of our major agency partners and their clients in lieu of our traditional presence at Carnegie Hall,” said John Halley, the company’s new president of U.S. ad sales, in a statement. “We believe this expanded format will prove more effective in facilitating our upcoming upfront discussions.”

NBCUniversal, highlighting how easy it is to use data and technology to enhance advertising for marketers and viewers, said a number of clients are using viewing data from alternative measurement company iSpot as currency for some of their upfront cross-platform buys. A dozen advertisers, including General Motors, Marriott Bonvoy, PepsiCo, State Farm, T-Mobile and Wayfair have joined The Currency Council, a group NBCU formed to accelerate the use of unified measurement, multiple currencies and new transactional models.

Madison Avenue’s growing interest in sports and streaming video helped Fox Corp. nab new ad dollars amid a softening market. The owner of the Fox broadcast network, Fox Sports and Fox News Channel expects an uptick in advertising commitments made in advance of its next programming schedule, according to a person familiar with the matter, as the company becomes the latest media outlet to wrap negotiations in the industry’s annual upfront selling session.

E.W. Scripps’ Scripps Networks division said it will use TVision’s viewer attention data to highlight the engaged audiences of its over-the-air channels during upfront presentations. The Scripps Networks entertainment channels include Ion, Grit, Bounce Laff, TrueReal and Defy TV. TVision’s Attention to Duration Index shows that the Scripps networks average 50% higher than other linear networks for keeping its viewers in the room and engaged with ad content.

Following other major network groups’ new data deals for the upcoming TV ad upfront, Discovery said it will be using TV analytics company EDO as a “preferred behavioral measurement partner” to measure ad campaigns for marketers’ business outcomes. EDO will give brands TV commercial airings connected to engagement data via the EDO Ad EnGage product — to be used by Discovery during the upfronts for its advertising clients.

Sony Pictures Television is teaming up with corporate sibling the Game Show Network for the companies’ first joint upfront presentation to advertisers. Live viewing and game shows’ capacity for brand integration will be two key areas of focus, an announcement said. In addition to staples like Jeopardy and some new programming, the pitch will also feature The Good Doctor, a marquee Sony property coming to the off-network syndication market in September.

Jim Tricarico: “As we approach this year’s Upfront, audiences will be top of mind for buyers, and therefore so should automation. Why? To realize the promise of data-driven TV — finding your audience no matter how or where they are watching — we need automation. Automation helps you find sports audiences. Automation helps you find children’s audiences. Essentially, automation helps you find audiences beyond the 18-to-54 demographic and create campaigns that meet today’s business objectives.”

An array of Black-owned media company executives will gather on March 15-16 to showcase their new and returning programming for advertisers and their agencies. Allen Media Group will anchor the two-afternoon virtual event designed to promote racial equity in the way marketing budgets are planned and allocated. Register here. 

With Wall Street scrutinizing media companies’ streaming progress and advertisers pressing to understand how the dollars they have moved from traditional TV to digital venues like Peacock, Hulu, HBO Max and Tubi are working, the networks have come under a new kind of pressure. To deal with it, many of them have already begun promotional efforts they would normally have saved for the industry’s annual “upfront” sales market in spring.

As buyers and sellers make plans for another upfront season, they face two issues that make it difficult for networks to increase revenue and for advertisers to reach as many companies as they expect. Ratings erosion for the linear networks is problem enough for anyone dependent on TV advertising. That problem is intensified by the networks’ propensity to overestimate how many viewers they’ll reach in order to have more inventory to sell, and the historic willingness of sellers to largely accept those inflated numbers in order to keep pricing down on a cost-per-thousand viewers basis.

Procter & Gamble, which spends millions to call attention to high-profile products like Crest, Tide and Pampers, said today it will negotiate directly with media outlets going forward — a move that is likely to take it out of typical “upfront” discussions that involve letting media-buying agencies utilize its ad spend for leverage in these annual talks between marketers and U.S. TV companies.

TV’s hottest properties this year may have little to do with the primetime lineup for which the medium is best known.

Advertisers are placing new emphasis on ad-supported streaming outlets like Walt Disney’s Hulu and NBCUniversal’s Peacock, while exploring opportunities with WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, Fox’s Tubi and ViacomCBS’s Pluto, according to four media buyers and three other executives familiar with the pace of the industry’s annual “upfront” negotiations, when Madison Avenue and U.S. media companies haggle over advertising inventory in the next programming cycle.

Procter & Gamble, the company behind Pampers diapers, Crest toothpaste and Old Spice men’s grooming products, has begun striking deals with certain TV networks as part of the upfront, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A day after calling for “sweeping changes” to transform the ad industry’s inclusiveness and diversity, the Association of National Advertisers this morning issued another call for “sweeping changes” in the “media ecosystem,” and specifically called on the television advertising industry to move the annual upfront negotiating season from a spring/early summer marketplace purchasing a fourth quarter through third quarter broadcast year to a fall/winter marketplace purchasing a conventional calendar year.

The coronavirus outbreak is poised to upend the way TV ad dollars are negotiated this spring, pushing deal-making to later in the year, according to multiple network and agency executives.
“This could be the catalyst for something that probably should have happened 20 years ago — move to calendar upfront,” says Peter Olsen, EVP, ad sales and content partnerships, A+E Networks. “My guess is the fall season will get delayed because they can’t produce pilots.”

Viacom maintained upfront dollar volume across its networks/platforms by “doubling” media agency deals across its digital, social and advanced advertising businesses.

Viacom relied on Madison Avenue’s interest in new forms of video advertising to drive activity in the industry’s annual “upfront” market, but captured a level of advance commitments that was similar to last year’s benchmarks, a signal that the current ad market is proving more robust for broadcast TV than it is for cable.

WarnerMedia — mostly the Turner cable networks in terms of ad sales — saw the same single-digit growth in dollar volume as other programmers have seen, according to a source familiar with the situation. It also was able to secure price increases in the double-digit range on a cost-per-thousand viewer (CPM) basis.

Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, the Crown Media Family Networks, posted double-digit percentage increases in the cost per thousand viewers and total dollar volume for the current upfront TV advertising market, according to the company. Crown Media did not reveal financial details.

The syndicated game show’s ad costs were unchanged despite the James Holzhauer winning streak.

A panel discussion featuring some of Madison Avenue’s biggest network TV buyers Thursday morning accused the network TV industry of misrepresenting itself in the previous year’s negotiations, even to the point of explicit fraud.

On the heels of its acquisition of 21st Century Fox, The Walt Disney Co. just announced it will hold its first combined upfront event featuring their combined networks: ABC, ESPN, Freeform, FX Networks and National Geographic Networks. The event will be held May 14 in New York City.