Future of TV Briefing: How TV-streaming ad sellers are pitching fluidity in this year’s upfront market

Flexibility isn’t the only f-word being flung around in this year’s upfront.

“Fluidity” is one way that companies including AMC Global Media, Disney, Paramount, TelevisaUnivision and Warner Bros. Discovery are able to offer flexibility to upfront advertisers. Rather than treating their traditional TV and streaming ad inventory in separate silos, the sellers are able to pool them together so that ads – and ad dollars – can move fluidly across their respective portfolios.

To be clear, fluidity – otherwise referred to as “converged” – is not a new practice. But it’s taking on greater importance in this year’s upfront. 

“We really believe in fluidity this year to maximize the delivery of whether it’s a traditional linear campaign or a converged campaign that’s cross platform to solve the challenge that we find advertisers have of not reaching full delivery of their campaign,” said Evan Adlman, evp of commercial sales and revenue operations at AMC Global Media.

For starters, traditional TV ad sellers need to continue to transition their ad businesses to streaming in order for the latter’s ad revenue to be proportional to its audience. Relatedly, linear TV inventory is becoming more scarce, making streaming inventory valuable for boosting audience reach. Plus, streaming ad targeting has become more advanced, which can complicate the congruence between the two inventory types as well as create more complementary opportunities.

“The conversations this year are more around first-party data that can be leveraged to help optimize the mix between linear and streaming against the audiences that [advertisers are] trying to reach. So I think it’s almost a little bit more surgical,” said Disney svp of addressable sales Jamie Power. 

“When we talk about fluidity it’s evolved, right? It’s evolved from just paying back people on audience deficiency on streaming or CTV from linear. But now what we’re trying to do is just data-driven video across all of our platforms. It shouldn’t matter how the ad is served. It shouldn’t matter where it runs,” said TelevisaUnivision president of U.S. advertising sales and marketing John Kozack.

Programmatic’s growing role in the upfront is a big part of that. Streaming has always lent itself to programmatic buying’s advanced audience-based targeting. “If you look at our streaming business, 95% or 96% of all streaming campaigns have audience targeting on it. Everything that we’re doing is data-driven and targeted,” said Power.

Companies have been increasingly making their traditional TV more programmatic-like through what’s typically called “data-driven linear,” i.e. traditional TV ads that can be somewhat targeted based on the specific audience segments that are most likely to tune in during certain shows or at certain times of day. These dual developments can help TV-and-streaming ad sellers to better manage campaigns across the two inventory types.

“We can target the same audience, and we can make sure that we have suppression capabilities to suppress the TV watchers when they’re on our streaming environments,” said Leo O’Connor, evp of streaming at Paramount’s advertising division.

The rise of streaming, the popularity of programmatic and the development of data-driven linear have combined to create not only new go-to-market approaches at companies but a new internal ad sales operation at Warner Bros. Discovery.

“We consolidated direct-response, advanced advertising – which is data-driven linear/digital buying and selling – as well as programmatic into one group called growth and performance, who’s a converged sales team that sells across everything. In addition, our holdco and client-direct teams are fully converged too,” said Ryan Gould, president of advertising sales at WBD.

Not everything is fully converged, though. There are still the legacy systems used by traditional TV ad buyers – as the legacy pricing models and currencies – that can muck things up as well.

“It is legacy systems that don’t talk to each other,” said Kozack.

“There is still a splintered reality when we deal with the operations of digital ad serving and linear,” said O’Connor.

“The biggest point of friction is, if we’re offering fluidity, our clients are often looking for a single price point. But they never had a single price point, even when you were selling linear only. So to that point, it’s really just selling through and explaining the value and how we’re going to steward a campaign that may hit five different inventory endpoints at five different price points,” Gould said.

In other words, there are legacy TV ad buying systems that still prize the gross rating point as the primary currency, whereas streaming is oriented around impressions with pricing that can fluctuate based on the audience on the other side of each impression. And there’s still work to be done to translate between the two. 

“There’s a lot of legacy systems that have supported this media type for decades and it’s deep-rooted all the way down to the procurement departments within both buyer and seller, and that’s something that needs to be modernized,” Adlman said.

What we’ve heard

“This is a really important upfront, because I think that the agency dynamics have changed, with a different agency ecosystem from prior years.”

— Dentsu’s Will Swayne

Numbers to know

$100 million: How much Netflix and Spotify may end up paying to poach Jay Shetty from YouTube.

28%: Percentage of streaming subscriptions that are bundled subscriptions.

$15 million: The profit that Paramount expects to net after selling the former “Late Show” time slot to Byron Allen.

What we’ve covered

Why retailers like Target and Aerie are moving beyond straight affiliate deals with creators:

• Retailers from Target to Urban Outfitters and Aerie are trading one-size-fits-all affiliate schemes for hybrid creator programs that mix gamified communities, tiered rewards and performance-based pay.
• The retailers’ goal is to fix affiliates’ weak spots like tracking gaps, scaling headaches and creator frustration with flat commissions.

Read more about creators’ affiliate deals here.

Dhar Mann is going to Tribeca X to prove CTV can do TV’s job — and that creators belong in the conversation:

• Creator and entrepreneur Dhar Mann doesn’t think creators are replacing traditional media — more that the lines between the two have disappeared.
• Mann, who owns his own production company, Dhar Mann Studios, believes these creator-built studios can provide more engaging content faster than traditional media, with the added bonus of an already-attached, engaged audience.

Read more about Dhar Mann here.

As feeds become entertainment hubs, marketers rethink social’s role:

• Brands are having to act like media companies, adapting by producing platform-native entertainment while still staying accountable to sales.
• Clipping, or turning long-form videos and streams into short, viral snippets, has become a go-to tactic for some brands to scale content across platforms.

Read more about social’s shift to entertainment here.

The healthcare creator is finally diagnosing how they best fit into the creator economy:

• As more people look for ways to be healthier or seek knowledge about medical ailments (especially in countries lacking universal health care) medical creators have stepped up.
• A recent Pew Research study revealed that 41% of health and wellness influencers say they have medical professional backgrounds, with 17% of them working in conventional medicine.

Read more about healthcare creators here.

Universal Ads must pass the pizza test if it’s to steal ad dollars from social:

• Recently, Comcast’s SMB-focused Universal Ads business released an MCP (Model Context Protocol) extension.
• The move means that small teams of marketers can connect home brewed AI media agents built with Claude or Gemini directly with Universal Ads, allowing them to build tools for campaign optimization or data analysis.

Read more about Universal Ads here.

What we’re reading

YouTubers’ Hollywood takeover:

Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms” is one of three hit movies made by YouTube creators this year that are confirming the platform’s place in the entertainment firmament, according to The New York Times.

Hulu’s shelf life:

Disney plans to fully fold Hulu into Disney+ and phase out the pioneering streamer’s standalone app by the end of this year, according to Business Insider.

CTV’s email-based ID problem:

CTV ad buyers and sellers aren’t buying into alternative IDs because they see downsides to using individual-level identifiers on a household-level device, according to AdExchanger.

Disney’s ads boss:

Rita Ferro has overseen an overhaul of Disney’s advertising business that includes the development of its ad tech stack and consolidation of its ad sales efforts, according to CNBC.

WTF is a podcast?:

As podcasts have morphed from radio talk shows to TV talk shows, industry organizations including Spotify and YouTube are trying to define what exactly is a podcast these days and how should podcast ads be measured, according to The Hollywood Reporter.