The advertising industry has always had a gift for taking perfectly good English words and making them mean something else entirely. "Reach" does not involve arms. "Impressions" have nothing to do with mimicry. And "penetration," mercifully, remains a term used only in conference rooms.

Now, as the television and streaming upfront marketplace prepares to begin its annual ritual of presentations, dinners and carefully negotiated commitments — the New York presentations start next week — a fresh crop of terminology has emerged for buyers and sellers to deploy at one another across the table.

"Flexibility," for instance, which in ordinary usage might describe a yoga instructor, here refers to the cancelation options that allow advertisers to back out of some portion of their commitments. Since 2020, when the economy developed a persistent cough, buyers have sought ever more generous escape hatches, typically expressed as the right to cancel X percent of quarterly spending up to Y days before the quarter begins.

"Fluidity" is its close cousin, describing the ability of sellers to move campaigns between traditional television inventory and streaming inventory — a useful trick given that one of those audiences is shrinking and the other is growing. (The seller, naturally, would prefer to retain the dollars regardless of where the eyeballs have wandered.)

Then there is "agentic AI," which refers to artificial intelligence tools capable of making decisions and completing tasks. In the upfront context, this means AI assistants helping with negotiation preparation — analyzing data, making planning recommendations. It does not yet mean ChatGPT calling a Paramount executive to haggle over scatter rates, though one imagines that day is coming.

Amazon, for its part, is emphasizing "outcomes" — the tangible business results like sales lift that advertisers can attribute to their spending. Roku has signed deals with Best Buy, Instacart and Kroger to help advertisers measure campaigns against such metrics.

The vocabulary may be new. The underlying negotiation, in which buyers want more flexibility and sellers want more commitment, remains eternal.

Original story published in Digiday: "Future of TV Briefing: The upfront glossary, 2026 edition"