
Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. What people are talking about today: It’s TV upfronts time. NBC Universal and Fox make their big pitches today to lure ad spending, and Univision’s two days of presentations are starting, too. (Check out our calendar here.) Despite the ritual song-and-dance routines, it’s an unsettling moment for traditional TV, since viewers are spending more time on digital platforms like YouTube and Netflix, and broadcast TV ratings are falling. As Ad Age’s Anthony Crupi writes in a piece analyzing each network’s weak spot, “Even ‘Roseanne’ can’t salvage live TV ratings.”
A data point: Young people in particular have deserted broadcast TV. The New York Times’ upfronts preview (headlined, “Why traditional TV is in trouble”) reminds us that the median age of viewers of ABC’s top-rated “Roseanne” reboot is 52.9 years old. And the median viewer of the CW’s high school drama “Riverdale” is 37.2 years old. That’s as low as it goes, when it comes to network shows.
Saved: NBC quickly grabbed “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” after Fox dropped it. The police sitcom “fits into our brand of comedy in many ways better than it ever fit into Fox,” NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt says. NBC is dedicating a night to Dick Wolf in the 2018-19 season and will lean on reality programming next spring. Read more on NBC’s upfronts announcements by Jeanine Poggi.
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