The fashion and style title Vogue broke site records for traffic, newsletter sign-ups and video views with its coverage of the annual Met Gala earlier this month, offering media companies a blueprint for translating cultural moments into recurring readerships. Rather than focus solely on maximizing traffic, the publisher employed a variety of strategies to capture…
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In its first in-person upfront week presentation since 2019, Disney wanted marketers to marvel. On Tuesday afternoon, the House of Mouse presented the breadth and depth of its portfolio at Basketball City, an expansive space on New York’s Pier 36, giving special attention to Disney+–which will be rolling out an ad-supported tier later this year–and…
The Mouse House offers few specifics about the coming ad-supported tier of its flagship streaming service.
As YouTube looks to be taken seriously among TV ad buyers, the tech giant was ready to put on a show during upfront week. The company–which moved its annual Brandcast event from NewFronts to upfront week for the first time ever this year–took advantage of its venue at Broadway’s Imperial Theater on Tuesday night, where…
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In return to live upfront show, YouTube makes appeal to media buyers with ad controls and measurement services.
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It wouldn’t be upfront week without Jimmy Kimmel’s annual roast during Disney’s presentation. Kimmel returned to the stage Tuesday afternoon at a new venue–New York’s Pier 36–to deliver another monologue skewering his own company and other broadcasters, as has been the tradition since 2003. But while the upfront may have been in-person for the first…
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Univision hosted its upfront at New York City’s Javits Center on Tuesday, opting for a hybrid prerecorded and in-person event. It was the network’s first upfront since the TelevisaUnivision merger was finalized. During her pitch to advertisers, the company’s President of Sales and Marketing Donna Speciale said “the time is now” for investing in content tailored to Hispanic audiences.
“Here’s one thing I bet you won’t hear all week: Our linear business is on fire. I’ve been on fire,” she said. “We are aware [how] all the linear progressions are going. We didn’t need to turn to streaming to save a struggling TV business. We saw an opportunity.”
In one highlight of the presentation, Speciale became not only a talking head but a talking point. She said her team would “do whatever it takes” to show advertisers Univision will be a “true partner”—evidently even if that means having “a little fun in the process.” The audience was then shown a prerecorded clip of Speciale taking a Latin dance class that saw her flipped, dipped and hoisted above her partner’s head, eliciting a massive response from the live audience.
The room erupted in applause, and afterward Speciale told the crowd, “That was a bucket list. That was a fucking bucket.”
As marketers thrill at this year’s return to crowded theaters and glitzy showcases, the question of how to best craft an upfront presentation for audiences anticipating a “return to normal” is still up in the air. The challenge for networks has been to figure out the right mix of live and prerecorded elements.
Fox’s upfront, held at Skylight on Vesey in Manhattan late Monday afternoon, was a glaring example of how not to win the hybrid model.
Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling screens, the audience hushed in anticipation as the presentation began, only to be met by an hour-long barrage of prerecorded spokespeople towering above them. This show, it became apparent, was going to be mostly canned. The presentation chugged along with stars including Gordon Ramsay and Mayim Bialik appearing on-screen—even though they were physically present in the building and waiting backstage for the reception.
During the Fox Sports portion of the presentation, a network exec joked to the crowd of advertisers, “From everyone at Fox Sports, I want to say thank you. We know that without you, we would just be Netflix”—a rather surreal self-dunk given that the crowd was watching a video stream.
The first round of applause sounded over an hour into the event, when an actual human being—Charlie Collier, CEO of Fox Entertainment—finally took the stage to offer closing remarks alongside Susan Sarandon. It was a jarring attempt at a high-wattage finale.
It felt a bit too little, too late, with the bulk of the presentation simply cycling through plans for Fox’s brands—Fox Sports, Fox News, Tubi and Fox Entertainment—with minimal fanfare and a mixed bag of jokes. A source close to the planning of the presentation told Ad Age that Fox began working on its upfront back in November; the heavy reliance on prerecorded video was meant to allow the show to go on even if there was yet another pandemic surge and a fresh round of restrictions on live events.
Related: How Fox is incorporating NFTs into new show ‘Krapopolis’
One question keeps popping up at this year’s upfronts: Do schedules matter? It depends on which network you ask. Fox, for one, has so far declined to share the day and hour slots for its fall slate, while ABC pushed the importance of its fall programming blocks.
As streaming overshadows linear, do advertisers care? The consensus from industry insiders is … not really.
“As viewers continue to watch the content they love on their terms, on-demand and according to their timeline, the notion of ‘day and date’ has become less relevant,” Dave Sederbaum, executive VP, head of video investment, Dentsu Media US, told Ad Age. “Furthermore, as our investment decisions are focused on specific audiences rather than programs per se, we are looking to reach consumers on their own time, in the right place and at the right time.”
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Ahead of its upfront Tuesday afternoon, Disney revealed the first details of its streaming platform’s ad-supported tier, announced earlier this year. Disney+ will scale back on screentime for marketers, offering just four minutes of ad time per hour and none for profiles marked for preschool viewers. And to preserve the Mouse House’s family focus on the platform, the company won’t allow alcohol and political ads—or, for that matter, commercials for content from rival studios.
Visit AdAge.com/upfront for full coverage of Disney’s upfront event at New York City’s Basketball City at Pier 36, which was still in progress as we were finalizing today’s newsletter.
Joining us late? You can find Monday’s edition here.
We’ll be back tomorrow with another edition of this pop-up newsletter. In the meantime, keep an eye on our up-to-the-minute coverage at AdAge.com/upfront.
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