NBCU interim ad chair discusses industry ahead of must-see upfront presentation

All eyes will be on NBCUniversal’s upfront presentation Monday morning, which will take place without long-time ad chief Linda Yaccarino, who has been named CEO of Twitter. Just three days before the show hits the Radio City Music Hall Stage, kicking off a week of glitzy gatherings to pitch advertisers on long-term TV inventory, NBCU announced that Yaccarino, the chairman of advertising and partnerships, was leaving the company effective immediately. Read more: Yaccarino is headed to Twitter Also see: NBCU's 2023 upfront Mark Marshall was named interim ad leader in place of Yaccarino. Prior to Yaccarino's exit, Marshall, the former president of ad sales and client partnerships, spoke with Ad Age about the upfront and said to expect a “a wonderful show to kick off the week.” NBCU and Marshall declined to provide additional comment following Yaccarino's exit as NBCU's chairman, advertising sales and partnerships. Upfronts and NewFronts blog Tracking the latest TV and digital ad pitches Read more here While Yaccarino’s swift exit will cast a shadow over the upfronts, protests related to the Writers’ Guild of America strike are anticipated to recur at events throughout the week, with Netflix choosing to opt for a virtual-only presentation. At its gathering, NBCU is expected to tout its programming across NBCU’s cable and broadcast channels and streamer Peacock, including the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, which features a distribution partnership with Twitter. The media company will also be pointing to its vast portfolio as a counter to advertisers nervous to commit budgets due to economic uncertainty on stage. Related: Everything advertisers need to know about Yaccarino “The legacy concern of putting dollars down and they’re locked down is not as relevant as what it was five years ago,” said Marshall. “The idea of firming up dollars gets overblown in this marketplace.” That’s because NBCU’s sales model is what Marshall describes as emblematic of modern dealmaking with built-in flexibility and distribution partners across owned and partner digital platforms to give marketers the opportunity to hit audiences consuming NBCU content on any screen. “A few years ago, there had been a migration of dollars to social,” said Marshall. “We’re seeing a bunch of advertisers now taking their dollars and moving it back [to TV], especially to cable and to sports.” On May 1, Marshall spoke with Ad Age to discuss competition between TV and social media platforms, the upfront market’s role in the age of programmatic buying and why NBCU isn’t worried about the economy. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity What is the common trend you’re hearing so far this year in conversations with advertisers? What everyone is trying to figure out is [advertisers] are continuing to try to guess where the audiences are going to morph to. You have sports, which have done extremely well, streaming is obviously growing, but at the same time, three out of four Americans are still watching linear TV every single week. And of all the streaming that’s out there, over half of it originated from linear TV. So, you’re trying to almost guess where the audiences are, and that’s why we rolled out one platform with the intention of—[advertisers] shouldn’t have to guess 18 months before an upfront of where audiences are going to be. We want to be able to deliver those and move those to be flexible enough to make sure we’re hitting the key objectives you have in certain time periods, and making sure that you have that flexibility to move inventory around and you’re not stuck with a plan that you built that is stuck in concrete. We’d rather be able to have fluidity to be able to move things around as audiences shift. Some of those places that eyeballs are going that you didn’t mention are digital video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Do you think those might be bigger pulls for ad dollars this year that used to go to TV? The nice part about what we’ve built in our ecosystem is if you want to buy Jimmy Fallon, for example, you want to buy him on NBC, Peacock, Twitter, YouTube—the only place you can buy Jimmy Fallon is through us regardless of where it runs. And I know our logos show up on a lot of presentations, but there’s a difference between distribution as well as ad sales. Sometimes in this transactional period, people do forget that you can’t buy those things from those platforms necessarily regardless of what logos are in their presentation. So your question of will it pull dollars, that works fine for us. We’re fine with finding the audiences wherever they are because we control that ad inventory regardless of platform. So with conversation around multi-screen viewing and fragmenting video budgets, is that your pitch to invest with NBCU rather than with social platforms that may be cheaper on their own? It’s interesting: one of the things that we’ve seen, especially on our cable side, is advertisers moving dollars back from social to TV. What we continue to hear is they were losing their brand metrics, and they also were losing the purchase intent on the social side. A few years ago, there had been a migration of dollars to social. We’re seeing a bunch of advertisers now taking their dollars and moving it back, especially to cable and to sports. There is that theory of do you spread your dollars out and go into long tail and you end up in areas that may or may not be brand aligned with what you’re looking for, so we’ve gone out to the marketplace to all the agencies with very specific overviews in regards to reach and frequency. Because a lot of times people would think that you’re reaching the same people within NBCU, but when you look at how wide a swath of content that we have, that’s not the case. If you look at NBC and Peacock, in one month, those two deliver 159 million people. Of those 159 million people, there’s only 10% duplication in that number. So while there’s this fragmentation that has happened, the great news for a marketer is they're actually finding new audiences. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs What are the biggest challenges facing NBCU or the sell-side in general this upfront season? We feel much better from macroeconomic elements than where we did probably a couple of months ago. We’ve had a great first and second quarter; from the scatter marketplace, we’re right where we want to be. There is a mindset as well—the idea of not thinking of NBCU as a legacy company. When we look at our impressions, 40% of our consumption now is done on digital, and our digital is tremendously different than digital in general. Digital is a catch-all term, but if you think about our streaming, 95% of all of our ads are seen to full completion. That does not exist from a normal digital standpoint. So we have stories we need to tell, probably have to debunk some of the myths that are out there, but I don’t feel like there’s huge challenges in front of us now that the economy is seemingly getting its sea legs back. So how do you anticipate NBCU’s upfront will perform? It’s still going to be a really strong uptrend overall, but I do think as more dollars continue to migrate to programmatic—the upfront marketplace will still play a very significant role, but we have advertisers who are buying to be on the air tonight on programmatic. As more dollars flow through programmatic channels, you’ll have more of that real-time marketing. We’re still seeing it’s going to be a strong upfront because of the categories: the movie studio category will have more releases than it did pre-pandemic, we have 60 auto launches that are going to happen over the next broadcast year, 32 pharma launches and that doesn’t take into account things like retail and other areas that are going to be very big in fourth quarter. You’ve seen it in the earnings reports as well. Brands like P&G and McDonald’s that have been able to pass through costs to the consumer, and the consumer has been okay with it. You’re not able to do that if you’re not building your brand. Do the recent changes in NBCU’s leadership—Jeff Shell exiting the company—have any impact on the ad team or your upfront? We feel very good about where we are with our leadership that we have across Comcast and NBCU. We feel great about the stability and the talent that we have. And as it impacts the ad sales side, I don’t think there’ll be any impacts that anyone would feel on our side of it. Linda [Yaccarino] has been here for over 10 years. I’ve been here nine years. Our leadership on the ad sales team is probably close to 10 years as well. ~ ~ ~CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the monthly reach of NBC and Peacock.

NBCU interim ad chair discusses industry ahead of must-see upfront presentation

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