This Future of TV Briefing covers the latest in streaming and TV for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →This briefing is made available to all Digiday readers through apartnership with sponsor DirecTV AdvertisingThis week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how WBD’s programmatic advertising business has evolved with programmatic playing a bigger part in its upfront deals.
WBD’s biddable upfront
Upfront advertisers already represent a major share of Warner Bros. Discovery’s programmatic advertising business. Nearly of the advertiser demand for WBD’s biddable inventory comes through the upfront, according to a WBD spokesperson.
That share stands to grow as HBO Max’s parent company facilitates more automated ad buying with agency holding companies and sees a shift toward programmatic private marketplace deals with advertisers becoming more popular and accepted. “We also welcome [programmatic] more heavily into sports than we ever did before,” said Jill Steinhauser, group svp of platform monetization and partnerships at WBD, in an interview.
This year’s upfront market seems like an inflection point for WBD’s programmatic business (and not just because of the looming takeover by Paramount). In the past year, the company made its live sports inventory – including this spring’s NCAA March Madness tournament – available programmatically, and it introduced a self-serve ad buying tool called NEO. And this year’s upfront comes as agentic ad buying appears set to move from warming up in the bullpen to the proverbial “early innings.” But it’s really that combination of programmatic and live sports – the ballhog of upfront ad dollars – that is having the most impact on WBD’s evolving programmatic business.
