Media Buying Briefing: Can principal media actually become the hero (for some) in upfront negotiations?

In a podcast recorded in the midst of the tariff whiplash last week, GroupM’s global head of business intelligence Kate Scott-Dawkins and her colleague Jeff Foster discussed some of that impact, noting that foreign carmakers including Audi and Jaguar Land Rover have said they’ll stop exporting cars to the U.S. for now. 

“Mercedes has signaled that they won’t import some of their lower priced entry-level models, because after the tariffs get added on, it just doesn’t become that accessible for what this original market segment was,” said Foster, associate director of business intelligence at GroupM, on the podcast. 

Auto advertisers spent nearly $25 billion on advertising in 2024, which means if some of those advertisers pull back, the market will feel the hole. 

One holding company investment exec who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely about negotiations, said they expect more pullback in the category from other carmakers too. “I’m sort of anticipating it,” said the buyer. “I’m just assuming it’s going to happen. But I have absolutely zero basis on that, other than I have to plan for the worst.”

The exec also pointed to other consumer packaged goods advertisers that one might expect to cut back spending if tariffs stay in place. “Some of them have a bigger issue there than people realize,” they said, adding that confectioners importing cocoa could also feel the pain of tariffs. “There’s so much manufactured in China … I keep asking the client leads, and they keep saying, No, no changes in budgets yet. Everybody’s talking about it though.”

Holding pattern on budgets

A second holding company media buyer who spoke on condition of anonymity agreed the reaction from clients has been more wait-and-see than actually cutting back — at least at this early point in the budgeting process. “It’s probably not as much hesitation as it’s just unknown, right?” said the investment exec. “[Clients] don’t know what’s going to happen. Because of that reason, they’re not able to even forecast properly at this point what they think those budgets could or should be — both for the short term and the long term.”

What’s got this buyer’s clients worried is plunging consumer confidence as a result of the threat of rising prices from the trade wars. At the beginning of 2025, “there was a lot of consumer confidence — people were feeling really good,” said the buyer. “Then as certain things have been enacted … we’ve seen more [clients] become a little more cautious about what they spend, how they spend, how they’re planning, how they’re forecasting.”

Here’s where principal media buying — a practice almost exclusively used by the holding company agencies like Omnicom, Publicis, Dentsu, GroupM, Havas and to a lesser degree IPG — could actually help, explained a third media buyer, also at a holding company. Think of it, they said, in terms of risk mitigation at a time when risk is all around given the uncertainty in the marketplace. 

There are a few reasons for this somewhat unorthodox way of thinking, argued the third buyer. For one, media agencies assume the risk by purchasing the media upfront — they’ve shelled out the dough to nervous sellers worried a pullback will leave them with unsold airtime. Then there’s the cost savings associated with the sweetheart deals sellers might be offering, due to those same concerns over unsold inventory. Finally, the client knows more exactly what inventory they’re getting when the agency re-sells it to them — because the agency knows what it’s bought. 

“In times like like these, we will lean heavier into into our [principal buying arm] in order to help [media] partners out if they need help with their inventory and bottom lines, in terms of how much inventory they were able to sell in the upfront,” said the second buyer. “But it also helps our clients who are looking to potentially retain value in a marketplace where their dollars might not be flat or up.”

The impact of SMBs

For those media agencies without principal buying arms, the pull toward investing client dollars into more digital platforms and away from traditional media forms will be undeniable. That’s largely a result of small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) placing their dollars there thanks to better attribution tracking in digital-first formats. GroupM’s Scott-Dawkins and Foster even addressed that in their podcast. 

“That wealth of small business expenditure, especially going into those large digital platforms like Google and Meta, are still helping to support some level of growth through the end of the year,” said Scott-Dawkins.

“Getting more measurable results from those types of ad platforms is going to be incredibly important for the small-medium business advertisers, where some of these companies might have been willing to advertise maybe on television,” added Foster. “Maybe this puts the brakes on that a little bit more and they go back into more the digital platforms where it’s a little bit tangible with the results in the measurement capabilities.”   

Revisiting households

Meanwhile, there’s a call from some corners of the ad marketplace to reconsider household audience data as a primary source of measurement for the upfronts, particularly when it comes to investing in TV. 

Ashwini Karandikar, evp of media, technology and data at the 4A’s, and Jason Manningham, CEO of TV data tech firm Blockgraph, argued in a white paper they’ve issued, that investing in linear and CTV more effectively — much of which will be done during the upfronts — requires a fresh look at households as a primary demographic to measure effective reach. Although Karandikar stressed this is about “and” and not “or” — as in, households should be considered alongside other demographic specifics.

Part of their reasoning is privacy-driven, due to the mishegoss of state-by-state privacy limitations as opposed to a national framework — but it’s also brought on by signal loss with cookie deprecation. 

“Because most TV is consumed at the household level, it’s rooted in a subscriber relationship,” said Manningham. “When you send someone a bill every month for TV, for internet, for a streaming service, you have to ultimately know their postal address. And it also was a really good way to tie back purchases, because a lot of the purchases that the advertisers who are looking to track billing data associated with it, [were able] to capture that postal address. So we found that household addresses — when it’s rooted in first party data —was a really durable ID for connecting all this converged behavior for both advertisers and for publishers.”

“The key takeaway is that something that was written off is clearly back, because that is really the only way for us to clearly measure, clearly understand consumption and really experiment with privacy forward approaches,” added Karandikar.

Color by numbers

Who were the biggest advertisers using out-of-home media in 2024? The Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America released its Megabrands report, which detailed the largest spenders in the medium. Here are a few highlights from the report. 

The top five spenders overall were:

• Apple – $68.3 million 
• McDonald’s – $61.0 million 
• Amazon – $55.1 million
• Coca-Cola – $46.8 million
• Verizon – $44.2 million 

Other stats in the report:

• Legal Services was the fastest-growing category in 2024, up 16% over 2023 
• Chain Food Stores & Supermarkets upped their spend by 15% 
• Digital OOH accounted for 34% of total spend, which the OAAA attributed to growing adoption among performance-focused advertisers. 

Takeoff & landing

• Havas’ Q1 earnings, while not reason to pop champagne just yet, showed a turnaround in North America, where revenue grew 3.2% — compared to a 4% backslide in Q1 of 2024. Total revenue for the French holdco was up 5.2%, while organic growth hit 2.1%. 
• Barkley OKRP’s new media agency, MissionOne Media, purchased AI-driven SEO search specialist Growth Skills. The latter’s CEO Lavall Chichester, becomes evp of SEO and AI optimization and will report to MissionOne president Sean Corcoran.
• Independent shop Acadia bought Crush, an ecommerce consultancy with a specialty in all things Amazon, in order to keep growing its commerce and retail media chops. 
• Former EssenceMediacom head of strategy Anush Prabhu has launched his own consultancy, Braindrops Strategy, which helps brands with crafting a better market approach, strengthening audience connections, or more effectively integrating creative and media.

Direct quote

“Because we work with so many small hometown retailers in C and D counties, the scalability of the impression base, in some cases, is real tough to get to. Most of the DSPs will come back and say, ‘Hey, can I can I expand the geography instead of going out 15 or 20 miles, to 50?’ For a lot of our clients, you can’t. They’re restricted to an area where they can advertise. But that’s the DSPs’ answer. Then they’re finding places that the inventory isn’t maybe quite as good … they’re going to blow it out so they hit their numbers. And I don’t believe in that. I’d rather return the money to the client so they could put it towards their next campaign than spend it on something that doesn’t make sense.”

— James Mathews, director of digital at GWH (Greg Welteroth Holdings), which owns GWA agency, on frustrations with DSPs in general.

Speed reading

• Sam Bradley dug into the reasons agencies and advertisers are still lukewarm on spending with X despite its improvements in brand safety and reduced pricing. 
• Krystal Scanlon assembled a series of charts that show the impact of tariffs on ad spending across the digital spectrum. 
• I wrote about how Brandtech Group’s AI-driven Pencil unit is collaborating with Google’s new Veo 2 product to help advertisers like Japan Airlines create low-cost and speedy-turnaround video content.