Just a month before the 2022 upfront, Discovery and WarnerMedia closed their merger to create what is now Warner Bros. Discovery. Jon Steinlauf, WBD’s chief U.S. ad sales officer, said that although the company had enough time to put on its Madison Square Garden upfronts show and dive into negotiations, “during the regulatory approvals we had no access to each other’s ad sales data…it really wasn’t enough time.”
A year later, this year’s negotiations are expected to more closely resemble what it could only allude to last year, in many ways epitomized by its revamped streamer Max. The platform, which launches the week after the TV upfronts on May 23, serves viewers a combination of Warner Bros. and Discovery content as a catch-all library for any interest, and with opportunities for advertisers the pre-merger platform had avoided.