TV’s upfront week, once cheerful, becomes poorly hedged and controversial
Making a money in the TV company is not as easy as before. As a result, the Blitish showcases that networks that are applied for their advertisers are not as fun as they ever were.
TVs annual “in advance” has been a staple of the Madison Avenue calendar for decades. Since the sixties, managers of at least one TV network have set up, as Ed Sullivan once said, “a really big show” for the top spenders of General Motors, Coca-Cola and Apple in the hope of securing millions of dollars for the next programming season. Participants regularly visited New York City, eaten on cooled shellfish, drunken free drink, collected TV-star signatures and met TV advertisements and media buyers from their current Robbureau of Record.
Now this spectacle is definitely less spectacular.
Opinweek once played in four days, but recently scaled back to three. Beyond is a long-running soiree from the end of the week, supported by Fox who once drew all top media agency executives (Fox’s current after-show case celebration is less ambitious and is no longer open to the press who has been attending for years. Perhaps the Murdochs have become tired of feeding the media?). The lack of CW is also the last day, when it was supported by CBS and the company once known as Time Warner. The current owner of the network, the Gigantic Nexstar TV station, seems to spend less quickly on luring advertising dollars when it still works to wring profit of the operation.
With fewer days to lure advertisement dollars, all current players in the industry run into each other. Amazon, which last year took over a Tuesday morning Slot that was previously held by Disney’s ESPN, is planning this year to talk to potential video advertisers on Monday evening and a lock used by Fox and NBCuniversal in recent years. Suddenly those two companies lose their grip on hours once used to keeping dinners and meetings with customers in the city.
As a result, NBC has moved an event that is built around Telemundo, usually on Monday evening to Tuesday, where it will probably encounter an after-party that is usually supplied by Disney. In the meantime, Disney is holding a press event on Tuesday morning to talk about ESPN that managers in Spanish-speaking gigantic televisaunivisie-anxiety away host journalists who usually attend a pre-showcase that has planned it in a similar time slot. In 2024, Amazon did exactly that by holding an event in Lower Manhattan that started later than expected, making the trek for a Univisie -Slichters in Midtown heavier.
The joy is palpable?
It is easy to blame the current state of affairs for the Coronavirus Pandemie. With large events that were then seen as ‘super spreaders’, the networks were able to turn to virtual, streaming presentations and advertisers and agencies that they did not have to meet each other personally to do business. And with more advertisement dollars who go to streaming and digital – arenas in which the TV networks are less dominant – the networks seem weaker, especially if Amazon and Netflix are joining them as part of the preceding calendar.
An important player has come from the ride. CBS once served a kind of Bellwether in advance, which held every year from Carnegie Hall, once the WHO to recruit his Primetime schedule. Nowadays, the parent company of the network, Paramount Global, hopes to sell desperately to a new owner. CBS no longer has Carnegie Hall since 2022.
The current advertising head of the company is not sorry. Traditional presentations have become ‘something that we simply listen to is not a great user experience,’ says John Halley, Paramount’s President of Advertising. The events are ‘bombastic’, he says, and there are no exchange of ideas between media outlet and advertiser. Instead, Paramount has nine different dinners for specific agencies and advertisers, full of guests who can include Drew Barrymore, Jon Stewart, Tony Romo and Jeremy Renner.
“Being able to hear from our customers what they need from us is crucial,” says Halley. “It is crucial and it cannot be replicated in the big show.”
The Upfront market remains important for advertisers who want to protect a presence when programming with a limited, blinker and you will be the shelf life of it. Those are things such as sport, a “SNL” anniversary special, news programming, a prize -giving ceremony, perhaps a limited series that only places episodes once a week. Almost all the other can be consumed or binged on the free time of a viewer.
The modern reality is that advertisers are often on the market all year round, not just in May. They know that if they need inventory, they can probably pick up something through programmatic technology with which they can buy pressing that are defined by specific target group characteristics or new systems from the new era that a commercial for dog food to one household and a place for cat food to the other rays.
With such dynamics in the game, the instructions have less importance than they ever did, although holding it still seems to be useful. The showcases bring the industry and its sponsors together for a week and generate promotional belts. Yet it is clear that their usefulness is decreasing, while their costs remain considerable.
Nobody will stop Outreach in advance until advertisers such as Procter & Gamble and McDonald’s say they have finished buying advertisements in such a way. Until that happens, the parties will continue. But some of the ‘crazy men’ who set up the shows may become more angry.
