How TV’s new ad leaders are strategizing for an upfront season that will define the industry

The TV ad market is undergoing major changes, not just in the way commercials are bought and sold, but in the leadership of sales teams at top media companies. Beyond leadership changes, TV networks also face stronger competition from tech platforms that have become heavyweights in the TV market. Connected TV sellers such as Roku are in the big leagues now, while tech-turned-media companies such as Amazon have fully disrupted the legacy bunch. As a result, 2025 may mark the starting line for TV’s tech race, with networks pushing innovations into the market after spending recent years refining their programmatic, data and performance marketing services to make TV transactions more like buying ads on YouTube. NextGen Marketing Summit Join us for a crash course on Gen Z, DTC marketing and the creator economy Register today This year’s upfront marketplace will put TV’s tech-ification to the test as the bidding season for media spending drifts further away from legacy media. Last year, upfront spending in digital video surpassed prime time linear commitments for the first time, according to eMarketer. Overall, upfront commitments made to prime time, which span the broadcast year beginning each fall, were stagnant last year and are projected to decline 4.5% this year compared to 2024. Meanwhile, digital video spending is expected to increase 24.8% year-over-year, per eMarketer. “The [TV ad] business is more technical and data-driven today than it’s ever been before,” said Jeff Collins, president of ad sales, marketing and partnerships, at Fox. “So [the TV ad chief] roles are increasingly as much about data and technology as they are about IP and premium content.” Last year, Collins succeeded Marianne Gambelli, a TV ad leader for more than four decades. A+E Networks’ Peter Olsen departed after 20 years leading sales at the company, replaced by Toby Byrne. This month, Warner Bros. Discovery announced a duo replacing former ad chief Jon Steinlauf, who had spent 40 years in TV advertising. Ryan Gould and Bobby Voltaggio were named co-presidents of U.S. ad sales, with Gould overseeing go-to-market and Voltaggio leading platform monetization. These moves from the past year follow changes atop Paramount and NBCUniversal’s ad divisions in 2022 and 2023, respectively. “The ability to adapt and evolve at pace to meet the needs of an ever-changing marketplace is key to being a successful leader in our industry,” said Gould. “Companies and leadership alike must rethink legacy trends and step up to meet clients where they are today.” The new TV ad leaders have ascended at a time when their businesses are significantly shifting. Their organizations are stuck between older workflows and new ways of selling ads. They have to contend with a mishmash of upfront and programmatic ad deals and cater to a more dynamic mix of brand advertisers and performance marketers. On top of all that, they are dealing with seismic shifts with the coming of AI and an increasingly uncertain political environment. The TV players have learned the new tech language of advertising, but now is the time to put it into practice, said Jay Askinasi, Roku’s senior VP and head of global media revenue and growth. Askinasi is also fairly fresh to the role, after joining Roku last January, replacing longtime ad leader Alison Levin, who joined NBCU’s ad force. “Most of the major TV sellers out there that we’re in the marketplace with are content businesses that want to be in the technology business,” Askinasi told Ad Age. “It’s easy to put in the press, but hard to put into practice. The industry is getting there, but it’s not there yet, and once those businesses are more fully fledged, automated, biddable and interoperable, that will allow the industry to really take the step forward.” TV and streaming ad prices in 2024-25 Primetime TV ad prices Cost of ads on Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu TV ad cost trends over the past decade The state of the TV ad market Heading into 2025, the TV ad market is off to a healthy start, but not “back to gangbusters like several years ago,” said Askinasi, referring to the pandemic bump in ad spending as businesses began to emerge from the initial uncertainty. In the years since the pandemic struck in 2020, the TV market has been mired in instability with setbacks including the lingering effects of the 2023 Hollywood strikes, the trajectory of linear and streaming distribution and economic volatility. The new Donald Trump presidency was another variable ad leaders cited heading into the upfronts this spring. Executives noted that international trade tariffs could drag down certain advertiser categories, potentially reducing media spending. Others noted an already positive path for TV investment this year, upping the state of spending from “stable to slightly positive,” according to WBD’s Gould. That optimism was a stark contrast to 2024’s market, which buyers described to Ad Age as the weakest in decades. Similar to their peers, WBD’s Gould and Voltaggio said their strategy for 2025 would prioritize ad deals that spread spending across the company’s digital and linear inventory with an emphasis on granular audience targeting. “The merging of art and science is exciting, applying that data-driven approach to more traditional tentpole marketing sponsorships,” Voltaggio told Ad Age. Doing so will require the media company to continue digging into its first-party data capabilities and clean room technology as well as launching new ad formats, Voltaggio said. Clean rooms are computing environments where media companies can match first-party data with advertisers, looking for specific audiences. Some ad leaders also recognize that content consumption has shifted beyond just linear and streaming. Fox’s Collins pointed to the launch of more “skinny bundles,” or cable packages based around specific content such as DirecTV’s MySports subscription launched this month, as a way to attract consumers back into the market, potentially adding incremental reach for advertisers. Fox has also been creating more opportunities in social media, including a digital extension of its Gordon Ramsay franchise called Bite. The collection of supplemental videos and recipes includes influencer partnerships and a push to align advertisers with the network’s digital entertainment content. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Gordon Ramsay (@gordongram) TelevisaUnivision has also pitched social media-focused partnerships in the company’s upfront deal-making. Social media has grown an area of emphasis for legacy TV companies as the appetite for traditional content grows digitally and, in some cases, declines in linear. Recently, CBS touted this year’s Grammy Awards as the “most social TV program ever,” drawing 102.2 million digital interactions, despite its 15.4 million viewers declining from the 2024 broadcast’s 16.9 million. AI and the next phase of Performance TV Collins predicted “uneven growth” for the players in the market moving forward, perhaps relegating market players as winners and losers in the next phase of TV advertising. Two factors hold the key to success in the modern TV era, according to Collins: the ability to attract massive live audiences on linear, primarily through high-profile sports rights deals, and the ability to target ads on connected TV. Fox broadcast the Super Bowl to record viewership this year, and it counts Tubi among its streaming properties. Through connected TV apps, “advertisers have the ability to supplement those large-scale audiences,” said Collins. “Those two ends of the spectrum seem to be in the most demand for advertisers right now.” Certain verticals, such as live sports, continued to drive high demand, but the divergence of performance between cable and broadcast programming led companies including WBD and Paramount to devalue their cable networks. In the case of NBCUniversal, it announced plans to divest from cable almost entirely while its broadcast entertainment has seen a resurgence. Simultaneously, ad-supported streaming has begun to solidify as a viable marketing channel independent of linear. Amazon Prime Video proved that last year with the rollout of its robust ad-supported subscription service, which brought sought-after scale to the market. Amazon’s ad push also inspired a pricing reset for streaming in last year’s upfront. Super Bowl ad review The best and worst commercials from the Big Game Click here In recent years, marketers have shuffled between these two tracks of mass-reaching brand awareness and results-oriented performance marketing. But now more sophisticated tools have merged them into a single course, and AI has infiltrated the ad platforms, helping plan media strategies, find audiences and customize the creative. There is “more excitement right now than I’ve ever seen” for advertisers to revamp their media strategies with AI audience modeling and data-driven ad formats in TV, said Tanner Elton, VP of U.S. ad sales at Amazon Ads. While Elton gave a nod to “great content” as the core draw of TV for advertisers and consumers alike, the differentiator for media companies in the ad market will be in the unique methods for engaging those consumers that each is developing. “The conversation has shifted a bit away from the content and toward the capabilities,” Elton said. Amazon is talking about increasing efficiency in the ad markets, optimizing for outcomes, and tying it all together through measurement, Elton said. In past years, brand or agency buyers representing different marketing objectives—awareness, consideration, conversion—would strategize with sellers independently “and then hope that everything aligns in a cohesive way,” Elton said. Now, TV companies are pegging their hopes for growth on improvements to outcomes-based targeting and measurement; more sophisticated audience data; the wider availability of streaming inventory programmatically; and the broader adoption of these capabilities, per Elton. Also read: Amazon spent $21 billion on ads and promotion in 2024 As more streaming is sold programmatically, the tools for developing automated buying strategies are also improving. Innovation in AI, for example, has made audience modeling more efficient, according to Elton. At CES, Amazon announced Brand+, an expansion to AI services in its demand-side platform. Brand+ started letting advertisers set awareness goals for their campaigns, complementing a performance AI ad tool Amazon previously launched. While tools like these have already powered digital ad buying at major tech companies, adoption in the TV space is more nascent. Many of these tech capabilities, such as AI, data and clean rooms, have been part of ongoing conversations among TV buyers and sellers, but “it takes time for people to understand it, operationalize it, grow a team that can use it and then match it with the marketplace,” said Roku’s Askinasi. “That sort of testing happened last year, and now you’re going to see a much more accelerated plan for clients going forward” in the TV market. The tech conversation has reshaped the upfront market, pulling it further away from what the hottest show or new primetime series will be. Askinasi noted that he recently met “with one of the largest marketers in the world, and more of that discussion was about [performance outcomes] than it was about premium and exclusive content.” In fact, the rise of programmatic, which enabled ad buyers to transact at any time of the year, has fueled the seemingly age-old question of the necessity of holding upfronts. But the TV networks and tech platforms have been using the upfront market as a way to establish longer relationships that also dictate the terms of their digital ad buying for the year. “There was an upfront last year, and there will be an upfront this year,” said Toby Byrne, president of ad sales, A+E Networks. “It certainly has changed plenty, but it certainly hasn’t gone away either. How you transact and the business terms have evolved over the years—all of that is different, but there still is an upfront, and it’s an important cycle.”

How TV’s new ad leaders are strategizing for an upfront season that will define the industry

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