Media Buying Briefing: The upfront is still not done — why and who’s benefiting from it

If there’s one consolation to this drawn-out process, the consensus among the buyers reached for this story is that in aggregate, clients spent more heavily in this year’s upfront than many buyers had expected back in March and April, when clients weren’t submitting their upfront budgets. Fear of tariffs, along with geopolitical upheaval, had a lot of buyers spooked back in the early spring that spending might drop considerably this upfront — that appears not to have been the case, judging by this unscientific sample of five buyers Digiday spoke with.

Simply put, long-term investment in video content across the linear, streaming and social space, has gotten infinitely more complex for a few reasons.

“Each year it’s getting harder to get intel on volume and pricing variances as the major media companies are disclosing this info. less and less,” said one buyer who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

“It’s a complex story. We’re done with the majority of our marketplace in terms of the dollars we’re going to write, but there’s a long, long tail that we’re slowly finishing,” said a second media buyer who also spoke on condition of anonymity. This buyer described this year’s upfront as a tale of two markets — those with sports inventory and then everyone else.

“Those companies with sports properties are the big winners,” garnering CPM increases in the mid-single to low-double digits depending on the property, added Eric Dunefsky, head of national investment at Crossmedia, who noted that volume is said to be up double digits. “NBCU and Disney will be the big winners. Both have an abundance of sports properties, especially NBCU who now adds NBA to their mix and have the Olympics and Super Bowl in 2026.”

The question is, will there be any dollars left for them after the money grab that was sports content?

That rush of ad dollars into any and all major sports content early in the upfront created an unintentional vacuum for a lot of entertainment content. Although NBC Universal and Fox proudly declared their upfront selling efforts closed, many cable networks, connected TV players and other sellers like cinema ad firms are working deals.

Pure entertainment properties aren’t faring particularly well, especially linear content be it broadcast or cable, while the bigger CTV players including Amazon Prime and Netflix have gained in their share of dollars. According to Dunefsky, streaming and CTV in general are securing low-to-mid single CPM increases even with volume gains. Netflix, he added, “is way up.” 

“For some clients, money has run out, depending on where people’s budgets are year over year,” said one buyer. In other cases, the anonymous buyer added, “maybe budgets have not run out because there is a certain thing that they can get from a podcast or from a certain network that they can’t get buying other networks, whether that’s a sponsorship opportunity, or something that’s endemic to them. … As the years have gone on, there have been certainly less dollars for the longer tail.”

If there’s a silver lining for the entertainment networks, it’s that they have fewer GRPs to sell since ratings are generally down, added the buyer, which translates to less inventory to have to sell in the upfront. “They weren’t necessarily looking for the same volume that others might have been looking for year over year,” they said.

Christine Martino, chief revenue officer at cinema ad firm Screenvision, said cinema advertising fared surprisingly well this upfront, even if it’s at the end of the line. She said she saw increases from auto, pharmaceutical and insurance advertisers, and wrote her lowest deals at flat CPMs compared to 2024’s upfront rates. But she added another boon has been getting scatter market advertisers to increase their upfront commitments. 

“A lot of networks I’ve talked to aren’t converting scatter to upfront partners this year, and that’s where cinema is seeing its growth,” said Martino. “It’s our scatter partners that are moving into the upfront space — it’s a story of supply and demand.”

One of the buyers acknowledged that advertisers seeking Gen Z audiences might look to cinema advertising since that cohort has “really become enamored with the with the cinema space.” But they expressed doubt that cinema is gaining double digit percentages in upfront revenue over 2024.

Asked what the hardest part of this year’s upfront was, the buyer pointed to continued frustration over currency inconsistencies — brought on largely by Nielsen’s big data plus panel ratings — which has made negotiations between buyers and sellers harder. That won’t be going away anytime soon, as sellers work to figure out whether it’s the result of bugs in Nielsen’’s methodology, or the harsh reality that some networks just don’t deliver ratings anymore given cord-cutting and changing viewing patterns.

So is there even need for an upfront anymore? Most likely, especially if sports continues to remain this prominent in the marketplace. According to this buyer, “It’s going to be hard to move away from an upfront model, because I think in order for advertisers to be able to get the inventory they want — those sports and tentpoles for now — they’ll have to compete against everyone else to get that inventory. I think as long as there’s still demand on that inventory, it’s going to keep the upfront marketplace alive for the time being.”

Color by numbers

WARC’s latest global consumer trend report identifies a growing gap between financial haves and have-nots but also addresses issues like AI’s impact on consumer habits. WARC looked into 54 markets to pull its stats together, the highlights of which include: 

• 55% of low-income consumers would rather pay less for a cheaper own-brand product than pay more for a brand they know;
• In the U.S., the wealthiest 10% of households now account for almost half of consumer spending;
• 47% of social media users have made purchases based on influencer endorsements in the past year;
• 24% of consumers are happy to have AI agents do their shopping for them, with ChatGPT the most popular of the AI platforms available to them.

Takeoff & landing

• Interpublic Group’s first-half earnings offered a mixed bag of results. While total revenue dropped almost 7% for the six months and organic revenue dropped 3.5%, operating income surged by almost 60% and the holdco had a healthier margin of 18%, up from 16.6% the company had forecast.
• Lots of acquisitions happened across the agency landscape last week. Publicis purchased Bespoke, a North American sports and experiential marketing agency; Havas purchased Spanish digital performance agency Tidart; Brainlabs acquired Exverus Media; and on a smaller level, mobile marketing agency Moburst bought Atlanta firm Rhythm.  
• Two holding companies announced agentic developments last week. Dentsu announced a partnership around agentic AI with Vurvey Labs, which aims to equip Carat teams with agentic AI tools to generate richer consumer insights and cultural relevance across media plans for clients. And IPG announced a new offering called Agentic Systems for Commerce (ASC), which aims to help brands navigate the commerce ecosystem to optimize performance, using data from Intelligence Node, the transaction data company the holdco acquired earlier this year. 
• Account moves: IPG Mediabrands landed Anthropic’s U.S. media business … GSD&M picked up creative and media duties for White Castle fast food chain … Kepler landed media AOR duties for performance apparel brand Rhone, according to reports … WPP Media’s Mindshare successfully defended media work for cereal brand Weetabix in Europe and the Middle East.  
• Personnel moves: WPromote hired veteran B2B marketing strategist Alicia Alongi to be the company’s first svp of B2B Strategy as it expands that capacity. 

Direct quote

“Advertisers know they can’t just be performance partners. You will run out of headroom. It will lack incrementality. And so having a full-funnel strategy is [now] table stakes.”

— Carly Carson, head of integrated media at agency PMG, speaking with Sam Bradley.

Speed reading

• Seb Joseph and I looked deep into S4 Capital’s poor performance of late, which stands in contrast to its founder Sir Martin Sorrell’s criticism of holding companies — a model he essentially created. 
• I spent some time with Horizon Sports & Experiences’ two leaders, David Levy and Chris Weil, to understand their role in the growing world of sports media and sponsorships. 
• And I broke the news of Brainlabs’ acquisition of Exverus Media, an L.A.-based media agency, to expand its full-funnel offerings.