Media Buying Briefing: The upfront has started to move, as sports leads the way again

Some holding company media agencies are keeping their plans and negotiations close to the vest at this point in the marketplace. And the $20-billion-plus selling season is probably close to about 10-15% complete — mostly with the linear media sellers (NBC Universal, Paramount, Disney, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery), but including a smattering of business done with digital-first or digital-only sellers (the major platforms), according to one holding company investment executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. The other holding companies reached for this story declined to comment.

Sellers “are definitely using sports to their advantage,” said the exec. “The pricing that they’re looking for is not matching up to the supply and demand dynamics of the marketplace.”

Obviously the biggest sports property is the Super Bowl, and Disney will run Super Bowl LXI on Feb. 14, 2027 on ABC and ESPN (a first time for ESPN). The company is selling spots for the first time since 2006 when ABC alone ran it, asking for an apparent $10 million per :30. According to buyers, the negotiations are no Valentine’s love letter and that Disney’s pacing on selling out trials what NBCU and Fox have gotten done by this point in the year when they’ve had the Super Bowl to sell.

“Disney is the most complicated story in the market right now. The Super Bowl is their centerpiece, and they came out asking $10 million per 30-second spot, which pushed a lot of buyers to the sidelines early,” explained Kaitlyn McInnis, executive director, integrated Investment Lead, Crossmedia. “That said, they’re still behind the pace Fox and NBC set in prior years. Part of that is structural. Disney hasn’t had a Super Bowl in 20 years, so they don’t have incumbent advertisers automatically rolling over. They’re building that demand from scratch while simultaneously trying to bundle in portfolio match requirements, which buyers are pushing back on hard. We’ve heard that they may be now entertaining counteroffers on the match, which is a meaningful concession and should help loosen things up.”

On background, a Disney ad sales representative said, “Demand for NFL advertising across Disney’s portfolio remains very strong, with momentum building across every major property.” And regarding the Super Bowl, the rep added “We have seen strong demand driving double digit units at $9 million each in addition to spending across Disney’s football portfolio.”

Which jibes perfectly with the holdco investment exec who declared, “There’s no way in hell I’m paying $10 million.”

What if you don’t have sports inventory? 

Outside of sports, the marketplace is moving much slower, agreed buyers. Entertainment inventory across the board is a harder conversation. To make matters worse, the amount of client dollars being earmarked for the upfront is constricting rather than expanding. The holding company executive noted this as a difference from prior years, where clients started off budgeting more conservatively, then releasing more funds as a buyer’s market unfolded. 

“The only reason that can explain that is that the sellers have acknowledged that budgets are down, and now they’re basically saying, ‘I’m not going to cave on my pricing, I’ll take my chance, I’ll write as much as I can in the upfront, and then I’ll do the rest in scatter’,” explained the buyer.

“Word is that budgets are flat year over year and the money that is moving is going almost entirely toward live sports and tentpole events,” said McInnis. “Sellers without a strong sports portfolio are having a genuinely difficult time generating momentum right now.”

Part of the problem, according to the buyers Digiday spoke with, is that the sellers are looking to secure both price increases as well as dollar volume increases — and buyers, at least those with enough clout and scale, won’t give into both. It’s a pick one or the other situation — if a seller wants to cut deals at a single-digit price increase, the total amount will drop. And vice versa. 

Ian Orekondy, head of product, media, analytics and innovation at agency Method1, pointed to a slow market at this point as well, and said some sellers are even offering verbal commitments with looser restrictions on ad categories that previously weren’t allowed in certain content. “We are awaiting written contract language to ensure this isn’t just a case of optimistic sales teams making promises that their legal team can’t commit to,” said Orekondy.

Cable-only sellers will likely have to wait weeks before they are able to get their shrinking piece of the upfront pie, especially since their universe keeps shrinking with continued cord cutting, said the holdco investment exec. “It might take us all summer to get those cable deals done,” they added.

What about programmatic and agentic? 

Orekondy said a majority (around 70%) of his agency’s clients’ TV spend is done via programmatic CTV, negotiated as part of their upfronts negotiations, “to lock in preferred pricing and unlock premium non-programmatic sponsorships opportunities and other value-adds,” he said. But Method1 is a smaller independent, and can afford to execute programmatically since its deals are less complicated. 

For larger Indies as well as the holding companies that are executing on behalf of multiple clients across multiple sellers, it’s somewhat of a different story. McInnis noted that “clients want flexibility and accountability, and programmatic gives them both.” 

But she added that addressable is returning to the conversations. “Addressable TV is becoming a major factor in upfront negotiations, so it’s not a trend anymore, it’s the baseline expectation walking into every deal,” said McInnis. “The platforms that can deliver on that with real measurement and real audience data are the ones capturing the programmatic dollars. The ones that can’t, will feel it.”

Although sellers are pushing hard to offer agentic solutions to attract more investment, it doesn’t seem to be a big factor on the buy side — yet. McInnis pointed to things like surfacing deal recommendations faster, flagging when pricing looks off against historical benchmarks, or helping with negotiation prep on the data side. “That stuff is genuinely useful and that’s really where agents belong in this process,” she said. “It’s the work that doesn’t require human judgment.”

Method1’s Orekondy said he’s been testing agentic buying since 2025 for a spirits client, “where we used AI agents to enable contextual CTV targeting at the program level, on curated media across premium FAST inventory.”

Color by numbers

I am and have been for the last 30 years a rabid fan of the New York Knicks, who find themselves up one game against the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals, their first Finals appearance since 1999. So it is with glee that I report game 1 of the Finals delivered a hefty 16.9 million viewers, a 90% surge over last year’s game 1 ratings, according to the NBA, using Nielsen big data + panel numbers. The last NBA Finals to break 20 million viewers was when the Golden State Warriors won in five games attracting an average 20.4 million.

Takeoff & landing

• There was lots of movement in the Australia/New Zealand region among clients last week. WPP Media’s Mindshare picked up region-wide media agency duties for Asahi Beverages from Omnicom’s PHD, including strategy, planning and buying across brands including Carlton, Victoria Bitter, Great Northern, Hard Rated and Schweppes. Accenture Song won media agency AOR duties for Australia Post. And Dentsu secured media agency duties for racing firm Tabcorp from OMD.  
• Havas Media Network will integrate outcomes platform Teads’ audience planning API into Havas’ Converged.AI platform, an agency first for Teads. 
• Other account moves: Dentsu India won Tata Group brands’ media business for the Indian Premier League, including Tata Motors, Air India Express and others … Indie Ars X Machina, won media AOR duties for Harmless Harvest, an organic coconut products company. 
• Personnel moves: Omnicom Media promoted Joey Zhao from COO to CEO of Omnicom Media China … Omnicom’s Hearts & Science UK tapped David Counsell to be its new chief investment officer, moving over from sibling unit OmniGOV.

Direct quote

“We have a perfect storm where the marketers/advertisers that care largely find themselves with only one option: to not participate. And even that option comes with risk. The largest agencies have proven they can’t be trusted regarding how they manage media … The very largest advertisers have different and unique relationships with these large agencies because the advertisers have direct media relationships, and by spending $1 billion or more, they play by and set their own rules with the agencies. Many other marketers don’t have the resources (audit, legal, management support, etc.) to better police their agencies.” 

—Steve Boehler, principal of Mercer Island Consulting, who works with brands and agencies, on the topic of principal media. (See below for Digiday’s latest coverage on the topic.)

Speed reading

• Seb Joseph heard Coca Cola’s CFO talking about what the food and beverage giant wants out of its new media agency, which it’s searching for globally in a review that pits WPP against Publicis. 
• I wrote about the ANA reconvening some of the main characters that helped create the K2 Report from 10 years ago, which revealed all manner of opaque and dubious practices by media agencies. 
• In his latest Future of TV Briefing, Tim Peterson looked into the return of the term fluidity in this year’s upfront marketplace, and why it’s come back.