Buyers Found This Upfront Considerably More Complicated, Which Is to Say It Was an Upfront

The advertising industry's annual ritual of predicting the death of the upfront television marketplace has entered its third decade, and like the rumors of Mark Twain's demise, the reports continue to be somewhat exaggerated.

This year's negotiations, however, did arrive with a genuinely different complexion. The Walt Disney Company was selling its first Super Bowl since acquiring the ABC network's NFL broadcasting rights, a development that added a certain frisson to conversations that might otherwise have proceeded along familiar lines. Streaming inventory, which barely figured in these discussions a few years ago, has become plentiful enough to complicate the mathematics considerably.

"For years, everyone said the upfront's dead or going to die," one buyer told Adweek, speaking with the anonymity that has become customary in these assessments. "It's going to continue to exist. But it is very different, and in some ways a lot more complicated."

(The alternative interpretation — that negotiations involving billions of dollars and dozens of platforms might naturally tend toward complexity — went unmentioned.)

Sports programming, which has become the last reliable source of mass simultaneous audiences in an increasingly fragmented landscape, drove a significant portion of the commitments. This is not a new phenomenon, but the intensity appears to have increased as programmers and platforms have bid up the rights to leagues and tournaments that guarantee advertiser attention.

The net effect, according to buyers who participated in the negotiations, was a marketplace that bore the traditional shape of the upfront — networks presenting programming, agencies committing dollars, deals struck before the scatter market opens — but with substantially more variables in the equation.

Whether this represents evolution or merely complication depends largely on one's relationship to the spreadsheets involved.

Original story published in adweek.com: "ADWEEK TV Advantage: Buyers Detail Involved Super Bowl Negotiations and a Complex Upfront"