Hasta La Creative!

Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. What people are talking about today: Thank you, Seth Meyers, for telling it like it is at the NBC upfront. As Ad Age’s Jeanine Poggi writes, Meyers joked that there are two kinds of development execs, “ones that develop new ideas and ones that rummage through the storage closet to see if we still have the Alf puppet.” Also, “if you had a show in the 90s and your phone didn’t ring this week,” he said, “you must have been heartbroken.”

The Fox and the Mouse: As TV networks woo ad buyers during the upfronts, the Fox broadcast network is casting itself as “New Fox” ahead of Disney’s likely deal to buy away its sibling cable assets and production studios. Admittedly, “New Fox” has a better ring to it than “Fox, spun off after the Disney deal because the FCC says companies can only own one broadcast network, and Disney already has ABC.” So what is the New Fox pitch? Well, a lot of sports. Poggi writes that ad buyers listening to the pitch were hammered over the head with the fact that Fox is airing “Thursday Night Football” in the fall.

Not so fresh: The Fox network’s fall schedule is “light on fresh fare,” with only a few new scripted series, as Anthony Crupi writes in Ad Age. One of Fox’s new comedies is set in a retirement home; it’s called “The Cool Kids.” Here’s a sample joke from the trailer: As the gang is riding in a car that’s about to get pulled over by the police, one of the retirees says, “All right, everybody just relax. Act like we have Alzheimer’s.” Ba-dum ching.

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