After months of brewing tensions, the Writers’ Guild of America officially declared a strike that went into effect Tuesday. The impact was instant—writing rooms for popular shows including ABC’s “Abbott Elementary” and Netflix’s “Cobra Kai” shuttered, late night shows and NBC’s “SNL” will air reruns, and CBS postponed its fall schedule reveal event originally planned for next week. In addition, protesters have formed picket lines outside of studios and completely obscured the entrance to Peacock’s NewFronts presentation this week, an occurrence anticipated to impact presentations during the TV upfront week beginning May 15.

The strike comes as advertisers and networks begin negotiations for the upfront season, when brands look to make long-term ad commitments. While multiple agency sources have told Ad Age they are preparing precautionary measures and readying demands for greater flexibility in ad commitments, network executives said they will rely on the bigger-than-ever state of media portfolios—if the strike has any impact at all.

“We are already scenario planning for when the impact of the loss of scripted programming starts to hit, what the loss of impressions will be and where we can move dollars to recapture those eyeballs,” said one media buyer.

Another buyer told Ad Age that this week has been an all-hands pivot contacting clients and the networks. The buyer said the networks each assured them that plenty of programming is finished and ready, and that “nobody was super concerned.”

The WGA has stated the strike was declared after failures to negotiate terms with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over pay and job stability in the streaming era as well as restrictions on the use of AI in screenwriting. If the strike continues into the summer, which many predict it will, the buyer said it will definitely impact ad negotiations, requiring greater transparency and flexibility than before from programmers.

TV networks either “have got to tell me everything they have that’s new and fresh that I'm going to be buying into, or I’m going to [buy] as I usually do, but with the caveat that if I’m starting to understand that these are going to be reruns then we have the right to renegotiate,” the buyer said.

Either way, the buyer said the writers’ strike gives the buy-side additional leverage in negotiating pricing and terms: “Depending on how bullish I want to be about it in this kind of marketplace, they're going to have to pay attention,” they said.

A third buyer said any potential disruptions would likely impact linear TV companies disproportionately.

“The broadcasters have a little bit more to worry about than the streamers, and that’s essentially because the streamers have an endless amount of content that they're not putting something on at eight o’clock that needs a writer and a script,” said the buyer. “If they do hold out [in negotiations with WGA], then it will have an effect on programming and the upfront, but one would say money’s already shifting to streaming.”

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The last writers’ strike lasted 100 days from late 2007 to early 2008. The strike similarly brought productions to a standstill, notably killing the momentum for promising series such as “Pushing Daisies” and forcing networks to lean in harder to reality programming.

But one network executive said the new strike shouldn’t throw advertisers too far off course as the industry is already accustomed to a new era of dealmaking.

Post-pandemic negotiations

“It reminds me of the pandemic years when everything was shut down: 'What is broadcast going to run in third and fourth quarter? What does late night become?’ There's clearly impact,” said the executive.

The pandemic brought with it new flexibility in negotiations to accommodate delayed productions as well as longer windows to cancel deals and the ability to shift investments among a media company’s portfolio, many of which now include multiple linear and streaming brands.

“We know that we have viewers that move between all of our different properties, regardless of if it's live, linear, digital or streaming,” said an NBCUniversal executive. “That’s why we built One Platform—it doesn’t matter if an audience is watching a rerun on linear or they’re watching it on digital, audiences will migrate to the content that they want and we will be able to understand those consumer shifts. Brands are putting dollars down to invest in the whole breadth and scale of our portfolio.”

However, a streaming executive said the strike could drive ad budgets further away from traditional networks as they seek volume-based deals without guaranteeing content.

“When it comes to driving the audiences this fall, [the networks] will do what they’ve been doing—figure out how to ram marketers into content whether they want it or not,” said the streaming executive. “They’re going to go ahead and sell as though nothing has happened and then they’ll mop it up in the fall. They’ll say, ‘Fuck it. We’ll deal with it later.’

Worst case scenario

If the strike continues long enough that it will impact programmers’ abilities to air scripted content in the fall, all is not lost. Multiple sources from both the buy- and sell-sides said there’s still strength in sports, news and reality programming, and networks that favor programming in those categories should have no problem. 

According to Nielsen, 82 of the 100 top-watched U.S. TV broadcasts in 2022 were NFL games. 

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But advertisers could also pivot in a different direction altogether: streaming and connected TV platforms, many of which feature popular international and licensed series, as well as user-generated video from the likes of TikTok and YouTube.

“There are so many ways to buy audiences who are watching video, and the agencies have already done a lot of pivoting to new platforms,” said the streaming executive.

The second agency buyer said that while social is a draw, and multi-screen viewing is top-of-mind this year, the strike “may play into more of a FAST channel push because a lot of the FAST channels are not original content; they’re all licensed programming … That could be where I see some of the money go just for safety.”

Rewind: What are FAST channels and why should advertisers care?

The first network executive added, “In the short term, the strike might [send advertisers to digital]. There’s other challenges to what is going to happen with TikTok from a government standpoint. Twitter still has ongoing challenges. YouTube might benefit a bit, and I do think that might be a reaction, but there’s a decent amount of spend already in those places for most clients—do [advertisers] want to double down? I think it depends on how long [the strike] runs.  

Either way, the most immediate and visual impact will manifest during the upfront week of typically lavish, celebrity-filled presentations. A third network executive said they anticipate their upfront could be protested and will take measures to ensure any protests are kept at a distance from the venue’s entrance so as not to disrupt clients, executives and talent arriving and leaving.