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 week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how major TV and streaming ad sellers are seeing upfront deals represent a larger share of their programmatic businesses.
The upfront and programmatic advertising marketplaces have become intertwined.
For Disney, 70 percent of advertiser demand for its biddable inventory comes from upfront advertisers, according to Disney svp of addressable sales Jamie Power. “The upfront shift into biddable, it started last year, and it’s accelerating into this year,” she said.
Warner Bros. Discovery is also seeing that acceleration. Nearly half of the company’s biddable demand comes from upfront advertisers, according to a company spokesperson. “It’s been a dramatic last year. This past cycle was the most dramatic shift to that,” said Jill Steinhauser, group svp of platform monetization and partnerships at WBD.
The intersection of programmatic and the upfront didn’t just happen last year, though. At least since the pandemic, major TV and streaming ad sellers have allowed advertisers’ programmatic spending to count toward their upfront commitments. So what is driving this dramatic shift of the upfront becoming so central to companies’ programmatic advertising businesses? Many things.
