The advertising industry has long maintained its own dialect, a patois that evolves with each selling season and tends to sound, to outsiders, like a language designed specifically to obscure what is actually being sold.
This year's upfront market, which begins in earnest next week with the traditional round of presentations in New York, offers a fresh vocabulary lesson. The new edition includes phrases that would have been incomprehensible a decade ago and others that are simply old concepts dressed in newer clothes.
Take "agentic AI," a term that refers to artificial intelligence tools capable of making decisions and completing tasks on behalf of their human operators. In the context of the upfront, this appears to mean software that helps buyers and sellers prepare for negotiations — analyzing data, making recommendations — rather than, say, a chatbot named Claude haggling directly over cancellation options. (Though one suspects that day is coming, and that Claude will prove a more patient negotiator than most media buyers.)
"Co-viewing measurement" describes the counting of how many people are in a room when a program or advertisement appears on screen. Because there is no deterministic method for peering into every living room in America, this is accomplished through sampling and projection — which is to say, it is panel-based measurement by another name.
"Flexibility" continues to refer, as it has for several years, to the terms under which advertisers may exit some portion of their upfront commitments. The word has taken on greater urgency since 2020, when "macroeconomic headwinds" became a phrase uttered without irony in conference rooms across Manhattan.
"Outcomes," meanwhile, describes the tangible business results — store visits, sales — that brands hope to attribute to their television and streaming advertisements. Amazon, according to AdExchanger, is making outcomes central to its pitch this year, promoting measurement tools under the banner Prime Video Insights. Roku has signed deals with retailers including Best Buy and Kroger to similar ends.
The vocabulary changes. The haggling, one suspects, remains much the same.
Original story published in Digiday: "Future of TV Briefing: The upfront glossary, 2026 edition"