The advertising business has always had a gift for making ordinary words mean slightly different things than they do to civilians. "Reach" does not mean what your yoga instructor means. "Impression" is not the thing comedians do. And "flexibility" has never, on Madison Avenue, referred to touching your toes.
This tendency becomes most concentrated each May, when the television and streaming companies gather in New York to conduct their annual ritual of persuading advertisers to commit large sums of money for inventory that does not yet exist. The upfront, as it is called, kicks off next week with presentations that will feature the usual mix of celebrity appearances, sizzle reels and terminology that requires translation.
Consider "agentic AI," which has emerged as this year's buzzword of choice. The phrase refers to artificial intelligence tools capable of making decisions and completing tasks — in this context, assisting buyers and sellers with the grunt work of analyzing data and preparing recommendations. (Whether ChatGPT will eventually be hammering out cancelation options remains, for now, a matter of speculation rather than practice.)
Then there is "fluidity," which describes a media company's ability to move advertising dollars between its traditional television inventory and its streaming offerings. This is particularly useful for companies watching their linear audiences decline while their streaming viewership grows — which is to say, for companies.
"Flexibility," meanwhile, refers most concretely to cancelation options, the terms that allow advertisers to escape some portion of their commitments if economic conditions sour. Upfront deals are, by their nature, meant to be firm. But the nature of the economy since 2020 has made advertisers rather keen on loosening them.
Amazon, Roku and AMC Networks have already begun making their pitches, each emphasizing "outcomes" — the tangible business results, like sales lift, that advertisers can attribute to their spending.
It is, in other words, another upfront. The vocabulary changes; the haggling remains.
Original story published in Digiday: "Future of TV Briefing: The upfront glossary, 2026 edition"