Future of TV Briefing: How sports will hog the ball in this year’s upfront
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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how live sports will likely be used by TV networks and streaming services in this year’s upfront to drive advertiser demand for non-sports programming.
- Moneyball
- WTF is the Ad Creative ID Framework?
- Apple TV minus, NBA ad sales, Sesame Street’s rough road ahead and more
Moneyball
Amazon and Netflix have each been hosting upfront previews with ad buyers in recent weeks. Per those in attendance, the companies have used these pre-upfront meetings to pitch programs like “Reacher” and “Rings of Power” in Amazon’s case and “Squid Game” and “Stranger Things” in Netflix’s. Curiously, the streamers’ respective live sports packages have been relatively sidelined in these meetings.
“In the pre-upfronts, oddly enough, they didn’t focus anything on sports. It’s like super weird,” said one agency executive.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company has expanded its live sports portfolio, is rolling out new measurement capabilities for live sports sponsorships and making its live sports inventory to small- and medium-sized advertisers through its demand-side platform as well as support for AI-generated ads. A Netflix spokesperson declined to comment.
But not all that weird when you think about it. That neither Amazon nor Netflix have put a high-wattage spotlight on sports in their pre-upfront presentations doesn’t mean sports is set to be an afterthought in this year’s upfront. Instead it suggests how sports will play an even more outsized role in the annual haggle to the point of not needing to be given much more lip service than it’s already receiving anyway.
“Everybody’s talking about sports right now,” said a second agency executive.
“Sports is gonna be a big play this year. It’s still that mass tune-in. We had some clients that took advantage of the Super Bowl this year, and you just can’t really get that effect anywhere outside of sports right now,” said a third agency executive.
“Live sports is continuing to be in high demand and an important marketplace,” said a fourth agency executive.
To be clear, sports has been an important part of the upfront marketplace for years. To the point where sports has been in many ways its own marketplace within the upfront. But this year, ad buyers expect TV network and streaming service owners to leverage the advertiser demand around live sports to push their other inventory. Because for as in demand as live sports is, other programming, such as scripted shows and docu-series on cable TV networks, has become less coveted.
“The networks are going to want to tie [sports] a bit back to the [non-sports programming] because they’re going to need to sell and move the other stuff too. They know that they’re going to sell [the sports inventory], but they’re going to want to tie it to the other media because they don’t want all their other media to just, you know, not be bought,” said the first agency executive.
“As live sports becomes more important, as streaming becomes more important, what is really the role of cable and how much is that needed in an upfront capacity?” said the fourth agency executive.
While posed as a rhetorical question, it’s an existential one for cable TV networks. Which would seem to help explain why, as part of its recent rebrand, A+E Global Media (née A+E Networks) is pitching two of its cable TV networks, History and Vice TV, as popular among sports audiences and therefore complementary inventory for sports-seeking advertisers.
The streaming side of the upfront market seems similarly set to be dominated by sports. Amazon and NBCUniversal, for example, will each be pitching the new additions of NBA games to their respective streaming services this fall. And Disney will similarly be touting ESPN’s upcoming standalone streaming service.
“We anticipate going into this year’s upfront [that] a lot of live sports streaming – with the success of Netflix having the Christmas Day games and NBC [streaming games on] Peacock and CBS [doing the same] with Paramount+ – it’s just like live sports in your streaming environment is going to be huge,” said the second agency executive.
And as if the intersection of live sports and streaming isn’t alluring enough to advertisers, there’s the increasing ability for advertisers to better target their ads to streaming live sports viewers through programmatic buying options and dynamic ad insertion capabilities. One executive at a company that will be selling live sports streaming inventory in this year’s upfront called attention to this opportunity.
“Everything that runs on [the company’s streaming service] is all DAI. So that inherently will provide more targetability, more measurability and more access via programmatic pipes. So that is definitely going to continue to be a major component of how we look to scale our sports offering,” said the sell-side executive.
What we’ve heard
“I had a call today with a client who was asking — knowing that his movie is perpetually in the top 10 on Netflix, even though the movie was made for a different studio — how is that helping him get rich. And the answer is it’s not really, because that’s not how those deals work downstream, with exceptions obviously.”
— Entertainment industry lawyer
Tl;dr IAB Tech Lab’s Ad Creative ID Framework is a system for passing ad IDs across the streaming ad supply chain, which would help with frequency management and ad delivery reporting. And support for the system has already been building, with AD-ID, NBCUniversal, Paramount and XR Extreme Reach on board. But there’s one big sticking point, as covered in the video below.
Numbers to know
$7 million: How much money NBC is asking advertisers to pay for ads in next year’s Super Bowl.
>5.8 million: Estimated number of U.S. subscribers that Apple TV+ added between January and February.
$4 billion: Price that Apollo is reportedly seeking in the potential sale of Cox Media Group.
9: Number of minutes’ worth of ads per hour of programming that streamers, on average, are serving to connected TV viewers.
3: Number of months after introducing a regional sports-free subscription package that Fubo has stopped offering the subscription.
What we’ve covered
Why advertising industry professionals are considering becoming creators:
- Ad industry employees are becoming creators, in part, to improve their job security.
- It’s a way for workers to build their personal brands and improve their job prospects.
Read more about ad industry creators here.
Forget celebrity vs. creator — it’s about the hybrid strategy in a $10B creator economy:
- Marketers are looking to work with celebrities that understand the creator economy and creators who are akin to traditional celebrities.
- Alix Earle and Taylor Lautner are cited as two examples of the celebrity-creator hybrids.
Read more about celebrity-creators here.
What we’re reading
The iPhone maker loses more than $1 billion per year on its streaming service, despite Apple TV+ having reached 45 million subscribers in 2024, according to The Information.
YouTube is testing a way for creators to swap out normally baked-in ad reads into videos, which appears aimed at podcasters but seems like it would affect non-podcast creators and publishers, according to Semafor.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s loss of NBA rights is its rivals’ gain as Amazon, Disney and NBCUniversal look to secure the ad dollars that would have gone WBD’s way, though the latter is still trying to hang on to some of that money, according to Variety.
Sesame Street’s rough road ahead:
WBD has opted against renewing its rights deal for “Sesame Street,” and the Trump administration’s U.S. Agency for International Development cuts have further kneecapped Sesame Workshop’s financial prospects, according to The New York Times.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commissions’ anti-DE&I crusade has put Paramount’s sale to Skydance Media in danger as FCC chairman Brendan Carr calls for companies to end DE&I programs, according to Bloomberg Law.
The Washington Post has shut down its free, ad-supported streaming TV channel nearly two years after launching it on Amazon’s former Freevee, according to The Desk.
