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- [00:09]
A
Welcome to the Big Story, a roundtable featuring members of the Ad Exchanger editorial team. Every week we bring you an in depth discussion of key developments in digital marketing and media. Today's episode is sponsored by Verve. Verve captures over a billion daily search, AI chat and zero party signals, giving brands and publishers a real time understanding of intent. Welcome to today's Post TV Upfronts episode. The upfronts are, of course, the TV industry's annual razzle dazzle. Their chance to woo TV buyers with the content they have planned for the year ahead. But increasingly, the upfronts haven't just been about talent and premieres. We're in the age of audience measurement and targeting. The years when new content showed up every fall are long behind us because we're swiping down to refresh on the hour. Let's be real. All of this change has made the upfronts more exciting than ever for Ad Exchanger. And this year, our Alyssa Boyle and Victoria McNally collectively went to eight upfront presentations. Nine if you count the Paramount dinner. They were at Amazon, Warner Brothers, Discovery, YouTube, YouTube, NBCUniversal, Disney. Did I say Amazon again? Televisa, Univision, Netflix, vlogs, all of those. I said a couple of them twice the list on. I'm just mimicking their lack of sleep because they've gone through tens of thousands of steps. They've been up late, they've been seeing Chapel roan woo buyers and they also know how TV and digital are looking more and more alike. So I can't wait to dive in. But before we get started, check for some last minute flight deals to swing by Programmatic AI Next week our team will be on the ground. They will be recording the Big Story podcast from the event and there are going to be hundreds of people there getting smarter about AI. So join us. So I always like to start with the buzzwords, with the upfronts because I feel like there's like a bingo card where, like when you start to get through some of those upfronts, you're like, oh wait, outcomes like. And then, and then you just, you know, work your way through the bingo card dancing and performances. And funny or not so funny, business jokes are also on that bingo card. But let's talk about the business buzzwords. What were they? What terms did you hear coming up time and time again?
- [02:41]
B
That was me. That was me ringing a buzzer as if I was on Netflix's stage because they had a Jeopardy bit about ad tech. So I will answer first and say number one buzzword that I heard was performance. And then I also heard the word dynamic in almost every presentation, such as dynamic creative. That was the most popular example. And the other buzzword was AI.
- [03:03]
C
And then also fandom. A lot of people were talking about fandom as a way to describe their audiences.
- [03:09]
A
Okay, interesting. Okay, so let's, let's start with. Actually let's start with fandom, which I feel like in some ways is the least ad exchanger one. But in my mind, fandom is like the rebranding of UGC or user generated content in some ways. I don't know, or maybe not.
- [03:27]
C
I would argue it's the rebranding of just audiences generally because, you know, TV upfronts has been going on for decades. The pitch has always been come to us because we make cool stuff that our audiences like. It's not just come to us because we make cool stuff. There has to be something beyond the art to sort of bring in advertisers. And that's just the nature of the TV business, you know, for better or worse. But I think by talking about it in terms of fandom, a lot of these companies are really leaning into that passion angle. That was a big thing for Fox especially. I think their, their tagline was turning passion into performance, which I don't love.
- [04:04]
B
I don't love the way that sounds.
- [04:05]
C
But yeah, well, if we're talking about things we don't love, I also, I have complicated feelings about the commodification of fandom and community spaces. So I noticed every time they used it as their buzzword, because I'm already thinking about like, ooh, there's this sort of entitlement that, that gets kind of caught up in that and sort of treating fans like shareholders or investors rather than people who are watching the thing that you made. But again, that makes a lot more sense for an advertising perspective because you want that audience to be there and you want them to be engaged and excited and talking about, you know, your show on threads and blue sky and yada yada. You want them to come to your branded convention like BravoCon or what is
- [04:46]
B
it, 90 day, 90 day con. I am so ready for that.
- [04:49]
C
That feels like a terrible idea.
- [04:52]
A
I think that's gonna end up being like a matchmaking event, like for the attendees. I don't know. Okay. Live events. Well, so it's, it's also kind of the shift from. So I'm wondering, because historically it's always like premium content, but now it' premium engaged audiences or the version of premium audience is a fan level. Of audience engagement.
- [05:17]
B
I would say that the word engagement and even attention, I thought came up more often than. See, I'm already forgetting it.
- [05:24]
A
What was the other premium?
- [05:26]
B
No.
- [05:27]
C
Performance.
- [05:28]
B
Nope.
- [05:28]
C
Dynamic?
- [05:29]
B
Nope.
- [05:30]
C
AI.
- [05:30]
B
I think we have to edit this part out.
- [05:32]
C
I already leave it in. This is our personality.
- [05:37]
A
It all works together. You're giving like, this is the. This is the real time mindset of a media buyer after they attend eight presentations. Like, yeah, they can't do.
- [05:46]
C
I gotta tell you, I truly don't know how agency reps with their, like, high heels and their gorgeously coiffed hair and their business lunches, I don't know how they do it. They also, you know, Premium.
- [06:00]
B
That was what I was thinking of. It didn't come up that much. That's why I had so much trouble with that.
- [06:05]
C
Yeah.
- [06:06]
B
Anyway, engagement and attention came up often because they were kind of positioned as the prerequisite of performance. That was nice alliteration.
- [06:13]
A
I liked it. Yeah. And we'll go back to the premium high heels lunches outfit. Corey, your train of thought.
- [06:20]
C
Sorry, say that again.
- [06:22]
A
I said we'll go back to the premium high heels lunches. That train of thought, like, you're like, I don't know how they do it. Yeah.
- [06:28]
C
Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I believe there was a time where the TV up fronts was four days rather than three, and it's been very shortened since.
- [06:38]
A
I remember that.
- [06:39]
C
I've been joking constantly about how it's such a good thing for us, especially that IAB decided to move their new fronts up to March rather than have it the week before upfronts as usual. Because it would have been possible new fronts upfronts and then programmatic AI. And I think that would have killed Alyssa for certain. I would be pretty close by. But I didn't participate with possible this year.
- [07:02]
B
Jokes on you. I already died. I reincarnated in time for pro Gai
- [07:08]
A
by Vegas fandom is the new premium content. I think is kind of the first interesting tent pole or shift that we're seeing now. I want to talk about the most ad exchanger thing ever, which is performance, which even I remember, you know, pre pandemic, whenever I would hear them talk about outcomes and performance, I was like, oh, this is just, you know, music to my ad exchanger ears. Because so much of it was, you know, about the content at that time versus the performance of that content. So what kind of cool ad tech, gadgety bits and bobs things, dashboards, tech do we got coming down the pike?
- [07:47]
B
I will Name a couple that come to mind. So Warner Bros. Discovery has a new Attribution Dashboard. The name's very long though, but okay, I'll say it. Fine. The Measurement and attribution. Oh, no, I messed it up. The always on Measurement and Attribution Dashboard, in case you couldn't pack enough buzzwords into a product. But, um, so the premise there is to just kind of make it easier for advertisers to access the various attribution partners that WPD works with. And they didn't actually name any explicitly, but they do work with, you know, a couple of the big ones, you know, I don't know, Video Edo. There's a couple. What else? I'll let you take some notes.
- [08:27]
C
Yeah, I will say NBC touted a bunch of its upcoming products as well, which we sort of got a preview of in advance of CES earlier, I guess in December last year, technically. So those are still, I guess, en route to being rolled out. They have the performance inside hub. They are doing more with live events and dynamic ad insertion. So that's something that they're very much working on. NBC, I will say, was of the different companies, one of the ones on the less ad tech, more content spectacle side of the. Of the binary, if you can call it a binary, whereas Netflix was definitely very much on the other side. They talked a lot about their programmatic investments, their, you know, bringing more audience targeting tools to Amazon's DSP and Yahoo. Dsp. Yeah, they were the only ones who said the word programmatic. I think out of everybody I checked my transcripts and I only saw it there.
- [09:28]
B
They also had. They mentioned auction dynamics. I believe that was unique to them too. And data clean rooms, that definitely didn't come up otherwise. And yeah, they had a really funny Jeopardy bit where they very much made fun of the fact that comedians on stage could answer any other question except for that one.
- [09:45]
A
Oh my gosh, that sounds like fun. And historically there's been a divide between, I think, you know, Google and YouTube was kind of the, the, the kid that was trying to kind of gain entry to the club for a long time. And now we've got not just YouTube but also Amazon, you know, Netflix, which I think is, you know, definitely a different category in itself, and that it's just you'd always been video content focused, but a streamer. So do you feel like they're blending together more or are there other distinct things beyond being able to name drop programmatic and clean rooms and their jeopardy?
- [10:27]
C
I will say, I don't know if this necessarily answers your question. But something that was really interesting to me at the YouTube brand cast is what they call theirs rather than upfronts, was that they, they actually, you know, they talked a lot about performance, but they also talked a lot about brand in addition to performance and sort of bucked the trend a little bit in making, you know, the importance of both being sort of on the same level. They brought out June Silverstein from Coach, she's their cmo and she sort of talked about, you know, like, performance marketing doesn't really mean anything if you don't have any demand for your product in the first place. And that was a big thing for Coach because they have this, you know, loyalty and this legacy, but they weren't reaching new customers who didn't care about any of that. So that was a big part of their pitch overall at YouTube, sort of talking about working with creators on sponsorship opportunities rather than those programmatic elements which they did give lip service to as well. They, I think of any of the companies this week that presented, gave the most interesting pitch for their own contextual AI products. They sort of broke it down into layman's terms and sort of said, here's, you know, what a typical AI product would do in terms of what keywords it would surface for the content. And here's what ours does and it's so much more nuanced and there's so many more content signals. They use the term signals also, which is interesting because that's one that Amazon really likes to use a lot. And I think you made the argument that they do it because they don't want to say the word data because that sounds kind of creepy.
- [11:56]
B
That is my opinion. But they do in fact use the word signals over data. They just won't tell me why.
- [12:03]
A
Interesting. So signals is the new data. I want to get into what marketers and media buyers will be taking out of these presentations. And before we do that, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to talk about that when we get back. I'm Sarah Sluice, Editorial Director of Ad Exchanger, and with me today is Samantha Dasher, SVP of Publisher Strategy at Verve, where she works with publishers on audience development in what may be one of the most interesting moments that Open Web has had in a decade. So welcome, Samantha.
- [12:41]
D
Thanks so much, Sarah. It's great to be here.
- [12:43]
A
Audience development is going through a real shift right now. How are you seeing discovery actually happen today?
- [12:51]
D
Discovery is no longer a one way highway and honestly, I Think that's a very good thing for publishers. A reader might find a story through Google, a friend texting them a link, a newsletter, a podcast mentioned TikTok, or increasingly through ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini. What's changed is that there are now more surfaces rewarding quality content instead of fewer. If you create something useful, authoritative or genuinely interesting, there are multiple ways for that content to travel to the consumer. At Verve, we have a unique lens into this because we see roughly a billion publisher searches and LLM prompts every day. That means we can watch behavior shift in near real time. And what we're seeing is that the strong content tends to win everywhere. A well reported article might rank in search, get cited by an AI assistant, show up in a newsletter and spark discussion elsewhere. And that compounding effect is real. And for publishers, it means the opportunity today is broader than it was during the era where everyone relied too heavily on one channel. So diversified discovery is healthier, more durable, and frankly, way more exciting.
- [13:57]
A
So one of the biggest shifts that you just alluded to is that if I'm looking for information, I'm not typing it into a search engine as often, often anymore. I'm putting it in a prompt and it's giving me that full answer. So what does that open up? How does that change things?
- [14:15]
D
Oh, a lot. Search queries were often really shorthand, two or three words with very little context. And prompts are very different from that. People are telling AI systems exactly what they want, often in full sentences with details, preferences, constraints and intent layered in. And that gives a much richer understanding of what consumers actually care about. Someone isn't just typing running shoes anymore. They're saying that they need marathon shoes under a certain budget because they over pronate and train four days a week. That's a completely different level of signal. Because we sit across both search and LLM activity at scale, we get to see that evolution happen side by side. It's one of the clearest indicators of where audience behavior is going. And for publishers, I think this creates real opportunity. The sites with actual expertise, niche, authority and content that answers nuanced questions well are positioned to win. This is a much better environment than the old game of chasing keywords and volume for the sake of volume.
- [15:20]
A
So with discovery changing so much and happening in so many places and new places, how are the publishers that you think are the most forward looking and innovative thinking about where to invest?
- [15:34]
D
The smartest publishers we work with are doing two things at once. They're protecting and optimizing the channels that still matter today while also investing in assets that compound tomorrow. Search still matters. It drives meaningful traffic and revenue, and publishers doing it well should absolutely stay focused to their but we're also seeing real momentum behind newsletters, registered users, first party data strategies, direct relationships, and content built to perform across AI surfaces. Those investments travel further because they create value across multiple channels at once. And part of what we help publishers do at Verve is understand where they already appear in search and LLM environments, where white space exists and where they can grow. When you can see a billion of these moments a day, patterns become very clear, I genuinely think this is one of the most interesting moments publisher has had in years. And I've been doing this for 16 years now. There are way more ways to reach audiences, more ways to monetize quality, and more value being placed on what great publishers do best.
- [16:40]
A
So audience development is expanding and it's important to think of audience development as something that's encompassing AI as well as all of these other tactics that people people have been using for a long time. So thank you Samantha, and thank you to VERB for supporting Ad Exchanger podcast.
- [16:58]
D
Thanks so much, Sarah. It was a real treat.
- [17:05]
A
And we are back. So you're a marketer, you're the co, you're the coach, cmo, you're a media buyer. You've just spent Monday through Wednesday attending all these upfront presentations. What do you think their takeaways and their next steps are based on what they've heard?
- [17:26]
B
I'll start by saying I think the the term and concept of ad performance is all over the place in terms of every tv, advertising, product announcement, conversation, whatever you want to call it. But I appreciate that there was also an emphasis on reach throughout the upfronts. Victoria described how YouTube positioned the importance of like, brand building and, you know, building a customer base. I think it's YouTube probably explicitly drew that line between reach and performance the most explicitly. But almost every other presentation did also emphasize reach in their own way, as in bragging about their scale, for example. Amazon, for example, definitely did that because it wants to be seen as, you know, like this whole Omni channel, to use another buzzword. But, you know, emphasizing, oh, we have Twitch, we have Shopping, we have this and that, Prime Video, Fire tv, yada, yada, yada, yada. But you get the idea they really want you to know, like we have scale, where you reach almost everybody. And then so that's one example. But a lot of the presentations focused a lot on reach, not as much as performance. But they did talk about reach.
- [18:30]
C
I would also argue that Televiso Univision did that as well. They really dug into the difference between their data quality and third party data quality when it comes to Hispanic audiences and sort of made the argument that, you know, when it comes to third party data, Hispanic audiences are consistently underreported. But obviously they are the exact audience that is coming to tu. So that gives them the opportunity to sort of point to a form of unduplicated reach. Because, you know, if, if somebody who speaks Spanish wants to watch a Spanish language version of the super bowl, they're not going to go to whoever has the super bowl that year to do it. They're going to go to TU or I guess Telemender sometimes has it. I'm not sure how that works specifically, but they're, they're not going to go to other providers if they want that.
- [19:15]
B
And yeah, speaking of reach and all that. So incremental reach or exclusive audiences was a point that I noticed a couple of publishers try to make. Netflix was one of them. They threw out a stat that was 44% incremental reach because I really want marketers to know, hey, there's actually a subset of Netflix consumers that only watch Netflix. Personally, I don't know if I. It doesn't sound believable to me, but hey, I mean, I'm not the statistician there.
- [19:38]
A
I mean, you're gonna have one service and you're a light viewer then I actually believe that, right. There's a lot of now that I'm in like the parenting demographic, right? Like I'm, I'm friends with many very light TV viewers, right? Like they don't got a lot of time.
- [19:56]
B
That's fair because like me and my roommate combined are subscribed to everything. So that's just a different, a different life experience, I guess.
- [20:02]
C
I'll also say YouTube made a similar argument specifically with regard to their shorts, which was interesting. I went into this week experience expecting to hear a lot more about short form video and there was some stuff here and there. TU has their own micronovela, you know, product already ready to go. At a time where other providers like Disney or NBC are kind of just starting to dip their toe in with dorky names like verts for Disney. But YouTube made the argument that more people who watch YouTube shorts don't watch Instagram Reels or TikTok, which makes sense to me because as somebody who watches a lot of YouTube, I go to YouTube for the long form stuff specifically and I don't have Instagram or TikTok on my phone. So I wouldn't necessarily say that that is a good thing if it's annoying their customers. Like, it annoys me. But that's a different conversation.
- [20:54]
B
Yeah, I'll corroborate that. From the other end of the spectrum, I, I have Instagram, I love reels. I use TikTok now. I do not watch YouTube shorts, I just don't like them. But YouTube, classic YouTube is my favorite thing. So a little good, a little bad for them, I guess.
- [21:12]
A
So, okay, so some nuances here around vertical video, short video and kind of the streamers getting into it, but I think with their own unique angle or their fandom, their premium content, I'll bring that premium even if they aren't. And I want to talk a little bit more about Netflix and Amazon. They're the newest entrants to the upfronts. They both launched around the same time and I think they've diverged in terms of audience, in terms of adoption, in terms of kind of their roadmap for how they're building out their product and their tech. So what could you maybe extrapolate about what their strategy is and how they're trying to woo the media buyers based on these presentations?
- [21:58]
C
I would say for Netflix, as I sort of said before, they went really crunchy and granular and ad tech jargony, not in a bad way, but just in a very specific. Like this is what you're. We know these are the conversations you're having, so we're also going to have them kind of way. Whereas Amazon, you know, they're, they're, you know, USP is a little unique specifically because they also have this big retail portal. So they can sort of point to interactive shoppable ads and dynamic creative and stuff that redirects people to, you know, where they can get products on Amazon in a way that's like very vertically integrated, I guess you could say. So they were not as granular, but they also were very specific about how they marketed themselves as sort of finding customers where they are and then getting them to sort of one stop shop in a very particular way. That was one of the announcements that they sort of had ahead of time. Dynamic TV creative. They weren't actually the only company to unveil that, but their use case for it makes a lot more sense when you can, you know, click on Amazon and add stuff to your cart.
- [23:07]
B
I have to pour a little cold water on this though, because they are talking about the, like personalizing the call to action that appears on a shoppable ad. So if you're watching a TV show and there's a shirt and just you could personalize the call to action based on someone, where someone is in their purchase journey. So maybe, for example, if I had put it in my cart and forgot
- [23:25]
C
about it anyway, or if you'd never seen the brand before, you would get a different one than if you'd seen it a couple of times. And they pitched that as being good for frequency and sort of varying up creative because it means that technically you're not seeing the same ad more than once, even though it is a lot of times the same creative.
- [23:44]
A
Mm.
- [23:44]
B
So my cold water on this one is that I, I just, I have an opinion that anecdotes about, you know, people, like real people don't love that they don't want buttons and QR codes and a computer screen when basically when they're trying to watch TV and it's, you know, I was at a friend's house. Nothing ad tech related was happening, by the way. This is just me having a friends. So I was with my friends and we were watching some game. I wasn't paying attention. I don't love sports. I shouldn't say that. That's okay. Anyway, so we were watching something and an ad came up. It was Prime Video and it's the call. The call to action was there. It said, send a phone. And my friend whose house it was and tv, it was said, why, why does, why does TV have to be a computer? You know? And I'm like, I agree with you. I don't like that. I just look around it like you're covering her shirt. I wanted to, I don't want to buy it. I'm just thinking, I'm just here to watch. I'm watching something. So anyway, I think, I don't know if it's a. Yeah, I mean, we're Gen Z. Maybe that's, that's. I don't know if that's a theme about types of people who don't love
- [24:45]
A
those good old fashioned retargeting digital ads. They wear me down. You're like, I'm not going to, I'm going to leave it in my shopping cart. And then you're just like harassed. And then you're like two weeks then, then it pops up two weeks later. It's like the last hurrah. And then I'm like, fine.
- [25:04]
B
Yeah, like, not to ramble, but every company is doing this to me a lot lately. I'll check Lyft and Or Uber. And then if I go away to go to the bathroom before I call my ride, it'll be like, quick, quick. You can get, you can get $4 off if you order it right now.
- [25:16]
A
Where are you going?
- [25:17]
B
And I'm like, calm down.
- [25:18]
A
Well, now we're going to get into a dynamic pricing conversation, which I don't want to get into there, but. But dynamic, creative. Amazon has a. Probably one of the better stories there, but I think it's just a question of that user adoption or feeling just kind of funny to people. Victoria, you want to add something?
- [25:37]
B
Yeah.
- [25:37]
C
I'll also say, I mean, you know, obviously there was a lot of conversation about performance, but there was a lot of conversation in the form of talking about sponsorship opportunities and sort of integrated branding and not necessarily product placement. But for Netflix especially, a big thing was developing ad campaigns with the characters from their shows or with the themes from their shows to be shown during those shows. And, you know, YouTube's pitch was similar, where you're working with the content creators and you're sort of developing stuff alongside them and it's usually going through an agency. So it's not as if they're left out of the process. YouTube. I forget his title off the top of my head, but Sean Downey made a big point when he was talking about different use cases to bring up, like the brand and then the agency that worked on it. So he would say, oh, we're working with Walmart and I think it was Omnicom, or we're working with, you know, Unilever and wpp. Like, so that was really interesting. And I think that's one way in which advertisers and companies that produce TV are sort of trying to get around that fatigue. Like, yeah, the shoppable stuff is good too, but you do want that, like, authenticity and trust. And that's something that YouTube talked about a lot.
- [26:45]
A
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And I've certainly seen those. I know, like, NBC does a lot of. A lot of them as well. Like with Hulu, I've definitely seen like the native ads featuring the stars of the reality show, you know, promoting a movie, for example.
- [27:01]
B
I think also to talk a little bit more about Netflix, I think so. Victoria mentioned that they were very heavy on the ad tech jargon. And I think the reason is because I remember when I covered Netflix first launching ads over those first couple of months and even over the first year after launching that, there was a lot of complaints from the buy side that they didn't feel Netflix's scale on its ad plan nor its targeting and measurement capabilities were up to their expectations as digital performance marketers. So I think because of that, Netflix has been really putting in the effort to emphasize like, no, no, no, no, no. We have scale, we have data, we have all these things. They even mentioned, I forget the verbatim quote here, but they were talking about the ability to target like local campaigns, for example. So they really want to emphasize their data quality, buzzword time and. But also I think the scale piece is really important too because we're talking about how, you know, reach and performance kind of go hand in hand, for lack of a better way of saying it. But again, because Netflix was originally scrutinized because of its perceived or apparent lack of ad plan growth, ad subscriber growth English. So because of that, now they're really overemphasizing the point of, you know, how many, what rate of subscribers are signing up for the ad plan, for example. So, you know, Sarah, you and I were just talking about this before, but if you were to ask me, you know, what percentage of Paramount or Peacock or whoever subscribers sign up for the ads plan, I couldn't tell you, but for Netflix it's an obvious 60%. I just, I checked myself, but my memory was right because they've drilled it in there. You know, they always want you to know, like, no, no, no, more people are signing for ads. More people want to watch ads and they're doing live.
- [28:36]
A
I watched, I watched Kevin Hart like stand up competition show and I was like very intrigued to watch Netflix doing live stuff.
- [28:45]
B
And yeah, Netflix, Netflix is really good with the comedy special. So I guess I'm a little bit biased there. If you haven't seen Marcelo Hernandez watch that on Netflix.
- [28:54]
A
Okay, I'll add, I'll add it to my queue. And okay, so two more things before we go. I think the first thing is like, what's next? Right. Like, I think, you know, historically we've gone into the negotiation period and then, you know, people are making these year long commitments and I think increasingly we're seeing people kind of make programmatic commitments as part of that negotiation. But then there's also been this narrative that like the upfronts are dead or over. Right. So like, what, what do you think is next in terms of what this deal making might look like this year compared to previous years?
- [29:35]
C
I don't know, it's sort of hard to say. I, I have heard, you know, similar sort of conjecture about more always on campaigns being important, less of an emphasis on buying upfront, literally, I did think it was interesting that YouTube sort of tried to get around that by pitching new tools and sort of advertising capabilities that will correlate to a brand's events, rather than, like, you know, like, you can choose to advertise around the super bowl or the World cup or the holiday season, or if you decide that you want to do National Lipstick Day, you can do that. So, yeah, like. Or like, you know, the anniversary of a brand, that sort of thing.
- [30:22]
D
So I think.
- [30:23]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think upfronts is gonna continue to be important for, you know, getting people in a room and talking about stuff and pitching to them and sort of setting a tone. I don't know that I necessarily think it's over yet, but it does feel like it's happening quicker and quicker and that we were kind of complaining about how there wasn't as much swag.
- [30:49]
B
Oh, my God. There was no swag. There was no swag. Disney. Disney had a little fun bracelet that was lighting up throughout their presentation. And other than that, I accidentally stole the reserved sign that was like a piece of cloth hung over a chair. So that's. My swag is just reserved.
- [31:03]
A
Like, well, you know, you know how to reach Alyssa if you want it back.
- [31:09]
C
But that also, that might be economic considerations as much as anything else, because obviously, like, money's tight and so are, you know, is the cost of plastic goods. So, you know, obviously they're not going to talk that much about economic tailwinds being a problem in these presentations because they're trying to put their best foot forward. But in having conversations outside of upfronts, you do get the sense that a lot of these companies are sort of trying to get advertisers to stay the course and not pull out. Because if you pull out, then that's bad for your branding long term, yada yada. And then it's also bad for those companies that don't have any money.
- [31:43]
B
Yeah. So I think the significance of upfronts is established, but I think we might see the format possibly continue to change because we are seeing more companies choose to take this whole private client dinner route. It started with Paramount in 2023, and then Roku followed suit starting in 2024.
- [32:00]
C
Snapchat last this year. Yeah, but that. More of a New Friends thing.
- [32:03]
A
I heard Mr. Beast did one as well. A breakfast.
- [32:08]
C
I didn't know about that.
- [32:09]
B
Talking about creators being their own media companies. I mean. All right, Mr. Beast, where's my invite?
- [32:14]
C
Fully good. I think I'm actually good No, I.
- [32:16]
B
I am too, actually. I don't. I don't know.
- [32:18]
A
So we've got performance, we've got dynamic creative. We've got fandom as being the themes. And I want to close. I'll give you guys each one sentence to talk about your favorite razzle dazzle moment.
- [32:32]
B
I don't know if this is so razzle dazzle, but it was funny. Oh, I have two answers. I'm sorry, I'm lying. Okay, so the razzle dazzle moment. The razzle dazzle moment happened when the heated rivalry actors came out. It wasn't. It wasn't the ones you're thinking of, but they. They were the. I want to call them the side couple. I'm sorry. They were like more minor characters, but it was Scott and Kip. They were the players that were kissing in the hockey rink. And then. Anyway, that was great. I loved seeing that. And then the funny part, also during Warner Bros. Discoveries presentation was when they had. They were talking about the puppy bowl. So they had puppies. A lot of puppies this year, by the way. Side theme. So they were talking about puppies and then they had a QR code appear on the screen because the QR codes are never going to leave us alone. So. And they were prompting media buyers to find out more information about adopting a. A dog from Best Friends Animal Society. And I was just observing because I'm like, well, they're not kitties, so I'm not doing it, but I can watch everybody else actually scanning it. You know, I mean, I don't think they're going home with a dog. But, you know, purchase intent and consideration is a full funnel. Full funnel came up a lot, too.
- [33:30]
A
And puppies were adopted. I'm into it.
- [33:33]
B
Yeah. Hopefully some kitties, too, but they never get as much love.
- [33:36]
A
And Victoria?
- [33:37]
C
Yeah, they had dogs available or not? Not for adoption.
- [33:41]
A
Dogs available for.
- [33:43]
B
No.
- [33:44]
C
Netflix has the rights to the Westminster Dog show this year, so they brought out some of the best in show. So, yeah, no, they're not available for purchase or adoption. They have, you know, loving families already that drive them to all these shows. But they were very cute. Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's funny. I. You know, we've been joking about Chopper Owen. I love her as a performer. That was a really huge highlight for me. I also kind of just loved walking into the televiso Univision presentation because they had these salsa performers. And you can see this in the video that we shot, there's sort of a small hallway leading into the theater section. And they had these salsa performers standing on either side of basically, like, serenading you and dancing with you as you came in. And it was very fun and unexpected. And something about that type of performance always just gets me, like, a little, like, emotional, like.
- [34:34]
B
Yeah. I mean, it was very. They made eye contact with you, so if you weren't dancing, they would look at you, like, dance n now. So I did. I had to.
- [34:42]
A
So if they. They got business people to salsa, I'm. I'm really impressed. It makes me want to put on 11 in the morning, some jams after this. So thank you so much for, you know, trotting around New York City for the upfronts. Also, if anyone hasn't checked out their videos, they're amazing and they have all this, like, footage they shot of the salsa dancing looks like Rockettes and so on. So definitely follow them on LinkedIn, follow ADXchanger on LinkedIn you can. Or their personal accounts so you can check them out. And thank you for reporting from the upfronts. Victoria and Alyssa. Now go get some rest. Today's episode was sponsored by Verve. Find out more@verve.com that's V E R V E dot com.