Future of TV Briefing: Inside Warner Bros. Discovery’s programmatic upfront pitch

WBD’s biddable upfront

Upfront advertisers already represent a major share of Warner Bros. Discovery’s programmatic advertising business. “More than half” of the advertiser demand for WBD’s biddable inventory comes through the upfront, said Jill Steinhauser, group svp of platform monetization and partnerships at WBD, in an interview.

That share stands to grow as HBO Max’s parent company facilitates more automated ad buying with agency holding companies and sees a shift toward programmatic private marketplace deals with advertisers becoming more popular and accepted. “We also welcome [programmatic] more heavily into sports than we ever did before,” Steinhauser said.

This year’s upfront market seems like an inflection point for WBD’s programmatic business (and not just because of the looming takeover by Paramount). In the past year, the company made its live sports inventory – including this spring’s NCAA March Madness tournament – available programmatically, and it introduced a self-serve ad buying tool called NEO. And this year’s upfront comes as agentic ad buying appears set to move from warming up in the bullpen to the proverbial “early innings.” But it’s really that combination of programmatic and live sports – the ballhog of upfront ad dollars – that is having the most impact on WBD’s evolving programmatic business.

Programmatic “does make things a little bit tricker when you get into sports and live sports. And obviously live sports is a big underpinning of the upfront these days with all the major streamers. So that’s something we’re constantly iterating on to try and think about, ‘OK, how do we make sure that this money lands?’” said Steinhauser.

The big risk with making live sports inventory available programmatically is the potential for tech failures, particularly because of how many impressions become available for sale instantaneously when you have millions of people streaming a game live. That’s why WBD has a set of requirements for any demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms looking to touch its live sports inventory.

For example, DSPs and SSPs need to be able to handle as many as 2 million queries per second, Steinhauser said. Additionally, “we need to know their failover model. We need an SLA. We need to know who’s on in their support team,” she said. 

The latter requirement is necessary because a company’s tech may pass all tests during the vetting process but then fail come game time. “Which can happen if someone’s not responding fast enough, which certainly has happened…. We typically cut them off. We did have to do that last year because [the company] couldn’t handle the load of response,” Steinhauser said. She declined to name the company but cited The Trade Desk, Walmart Connect, Amazon DSP, Yahoo DSP, Viant and StackAdapt as the DSPs that have performed the best.

As WBD opens up more live sports inventory for programmatic purchase, including the upcoming French Open tennis tournament, it is seeing a shift in the makeup of its programmatic deal types. Historically, programmatic guaranteed deals have predominated for upfront sellers like WBD because they most closely resemble the assured revenue of traditional upfront deals. PG deals remain in the mix, but Steinhauser is seeing a shift toward PMP deals, which WBD began offering three upfront cycles ago and are preferred by advertisers and agencies because they provide ad buyers greater flexibility and control of their spending.

“We’re seeing programmatic guaranteed as a deal type, while it’s still very sizable, the growth is leveling off on that product type. What we’re seeing now is more and more upfront going biddable,” Steinhauser said.

An even newer avenue for advertisers to direct their dollars is WBD’s year-old self-serve ad buying platform NEO. The platform remains in beta, “and we’ll start a full-blown sprint to get it to NEO 2.0,” said Steinhauser. While ad buyers have appreciated NEO making WBD’s full inventory portfolio available on a self-serve basis with minimal tech fees, she said bigger buyers have been hesitant to shift spending from existing programmatic or traditional direct sales channels to NEO “because of platform fatigue, fragmented workflows and not wanting to move off of what they already know.” As a result, WBD is looking to integrate NEO into agency holding companies’ planning systems.

“Right now [NEO] is a buying platform that doesn’t do that. So when [ad buyers are] picking up a piece of budget and moving it through NEO, they don’t necessarily have it in their mix and accounting. That’s very important for push-and-pull of data back and forth,” Steinhauser said.

And then there’s the newest and potentially most disruptive avenue for ad buying and selling. Yeah, I’m referring to agentic AI. It’d be easy to think agentic AI is to the 2026 upfront market what programmatic was to the 2006 upfront market: a new technology that has no place in a traditional marketplace with so much money at stake. But that’s not necessarily true. 

“I do think you’re going to see some agentic buys this upfront,” Steinhauser said.

What we’ve heard

“We were told straight up when we first started working with him that ‘Speed is Speed. You’re not going to edit him. You’re not going to do anything.’”

— Expedia’s Lauri Metrose on the brand’s sponsorship deal with IShowSpeed

Numbers to know

47.5%: Percentage share of surveyed marketers that expect to spend the same amount of money in this year’s upfront market as in last year’s.

$1.56 billion: Fox’s ad revenue in the first quarter of 2026.

$1.85 billion: Warner Bros. Discovery’s ad revenue in Q1 2026.

£3.99: Monthly subscription price for TikTok’s ad-free tier.

10.1 million: Number of paid streaming subscribers that AMC Global Media had at the end of Q1 2026.

-300,000: Number of paid subscribers that Fubo lost in its most recent fiscal quarter.

483 million: Number of daily active users that Snapchat had at the end of Q1 2026.

What we’ve covered

Inside Expedia’s year-long partnership with mega creator IShowSpeed:

• IShowSpeed has over 150 million followers across platforms including YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, who tune in to watch him complete athletic feats and travel around the world.
• A source familiar with creator deals of this size told Digiday they’d estimate the cost of such a partnership at around $250,000.

Read more about Expedia’s IShowSpeed partnership here.

Amazon is turning the upfront into a pitch for its ad tech:

• The ad tech side of Amazon’s upfront conversations will hinge on its unified buying system — the demand-side platform and Ads Console collapsed into one system.
• Amazon’s unified buying system features different modes for ad buyers to enlist AI agents in their buying processes.

Read more about Amazon’s upfront ad tech pitch here.

Mega creators find that their personalities alone aren’t scalable as standalone businesses:

• Industry executives stressed that creators who start their own companies should surround themselves with the right professionals to maximize their chances of success.
• Individuals aren’t scalable, and a single creator’s success cannot serve as a company’s structure or strategy.

Read more about mega creators’ company-building struggles here.

What we’re reading

Netflix’s privacy suit:

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against Netflix for allegedly collecting personal information from children without parents’ consent, according to Reuters.

The overarching upfront sales pitch:

Large live audiences are what matter most in this year’s upfront (just like last year and the year before and…), according to Variety.

YouTubers’ growth gurus:

Top creators like MrBeast are paying YouTube growth consultants $15,000 or more per month for help with titles, thumbnails and video strategy, according to CNBC.

Anime’s mainstream surge:

Sony-owned anime streamer Crunchyroll has seen its subscriber base grow by almost 25% in the past year, as the genre dominates among younger audiences, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Micro dramas’ deepfake promo problem:

Micro dramas are using AI to generate promotional clips featuring actors in sexual situations that were created without their consent, according to Business Insider.