Shortly after VideoWeek’s previous roundup, the NewFronts came to an end, with Meta, YouTube, and the New York Times among those wrapping up the week.
This week it was the broadcasters’ turn to pitch themselves to advertisers at the Upfronts. Alongside the big content announcements and star-led presentations which sit at the heart of the format, there were plenty of product announcements on the tech and ad innovation front.
Read on for all the big news from the Upfronts (and the final day of the Newfronts), covering NBCU, Disney, YouTube, Meta, Netflix, Fox, and more.
Highlights from the Upfronts
NBCUniversal: Rethinking Sports Broadcasting, and an Expanded Partnership with Tinuiti
NBCUniversal kicked off this year’s Upfronts, putting a lot of emphasis on live sports (which was a theme throughout the week). A cornerstone of its upcoming sports programme is “Legendary February”, a 17 day stretch next year when the broadcaster will host the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics and the NBA All-Star Weekend.
For the 2025-26 NBA season, NBCU is developing a number of new interactive features for its Peacock streaming platform. These include new catch-up features for live streams, an integrated real-time match data feed, and ‘Peacock Scorecard’, which it describes as “bingo meets fantasy sports”. In the second half of the season, it will launch ‘Courtside Live’, which will enable viewers more control over on-screen content, allowing them to watch player arrivals, pre-game shoot-arounds, and courtside reactions.
NBCU was fairly light on ad tech announcements, but did mention an expanded partnership with performance marketing firm Tinuiti, which it says will let Tinuiti clients leverage authenticated identifiers across NBCU’s digital properties.
FOX: FOX One and OneFOX
FOX Corp’s Upfronts coincided with its quarterly earnings, which showed a strong rise in ad revenues, powered by FOX’s broadcast of this year’s Super Bowl. Looking to capitalise on this momentum, the broadcaster announced a new streaming service and a new ad platform, co-branded as FOX One and OneFOX respectively.
FOX One will combine FOX’s news, sports, and entertainment content into one platform, with both live streams and on-demand access available. Pete Distad, CEO of FOX One, said the service will have personalisation technology which adapts to viewing preferences, integrating both live and on-demand content.
OneFOX, meanwhile, is described as a converged media platform which will use FOX’s various datasets including audience and contextual signals, as well as behavioural, creative, and campaign analytics, to fuel ad personalisation. The platform is powered by AdRise, and FOX says it will offer AI-powered planning; unified activation across linear, addressable, and digital media; and outcome-based measurement.
Warner Bros. Discovery: New Ad Platforms, and HBO Returns
Warner Bros. Discovery announced two new advertiser-facing platforms, NEO and DemoDirect, both aimed at simplifying and streamlining the broadcaster’s overall ad offering.
NEO, which will be launched later this year, will give buyers direct access to all of WBD’s video inventory across streaming, linear, FAST, and syndication, through one platform. Jill Steinhauser, WBD’s group SVP of platform monetisation and partnerships, said the new tool will provide customisation options around budgets, pacing, and optimisation goals; will provide more control and transparency over where and when ads are running; and will offer enhanced measurement capabilities. NEO is being developed through partnerships with FreeWheel and Magnite.
DemoDirect meanwhile is designed to simplify demographic-based buying across WBD’s linear network portfolio, by offering a single, optimised path to reach key audiences with one plan, one CPM, and one invoice”, according to a press release. These buys can also be extended across digital inventory through WBD’s converged media product StreamX.
WBD also announced ‘WBD Storyverse’, a new product to match brands up with WBD’s best-known content. But through all this, the news likely to pick up the most attention was the reveal that the broadcaster is returning its streaming service from ‘Max’ to ‘HBO Max’, reversing its original controversial decision to drop the HBO brand from the title.
Amazon: Focus on Sports, and AI-Powered Formats
In its sophomore year at the Upfronts, Amazon was among those putting sports centre stage. Wheeling out NFL brothers Jason and Travis Kelce to hammer home the point, Amazon highlighted its investment in sports rights, including its programme for this year’s Black Friday which it’s pitching as “the greatest Friday in sports”. The e-commerce giant also emphasised its own advantages in linking up major sports events with instantly shoppable brand opportunities and shopping data-led targeting.
Turning to tech, Amazon Ads announced a new AI-powered streaming ad format, which it says will enable advertisers “to reach engaged audiences with contextually relevant pause ads that seamlessly connect brands to the scenes viewers are watching in that moment”, according to a press release. It also unveiled new interactive formats, including enhanced shoppable ads with real-time Amazon shopping signals including pricing, deals, and reviews.
Within the Amazon DSP, Amazon announced ‘Amazon Publisher Cloud’, a clean room solution which it says allows publishers to securely combine their first-party data with Amazon’s signals, enabling buyers to run campaigns using these combined datasets across Amazon’s partnered publishers.
Netflix: New Ads Tier Data, and Netflix Ads Suite
Netflix’s executives have talked about the streamer reaching the ‘walk’ stage of its ‘crawl, walk, run’ model for advertising, as its ad tier has built significant scale. The company used this year’s Upfronts to highlight this growth, announcing it now has 94 million global monthly active users (up from 40 million at its previous Upfronts), while also claiming to have more 18-34-year-olds than any other US broadcast or cable network.
Advertising president Amy Reinhard also touted Netflix’s in-house ad tech, which it first announced at last year’s presentation. The Netflix Ads Suite, to give it its proper title, is already live in the US and Canada, and will be available in all of Netflix’s ad markets by June. Reinhard covered a few previous announcements, including data matching capabilities and programmatic buying options. There were also a few new announcements, including new first-party measurement solutions which will kick off with brand lift measurement. On the creative front, Netflix is launching new generative AI capabilities which “instantly marry advertisers’ ads with the worlds of Netflix’s shows”, according to a press release, and interactive formats for mid-roll and pause ads which will be available by 2026.
Disney: Details on New ESPN Streamer, and a Recap of AI Investments
Like Amazon, live sports was a major focus for Disney. And where Amazon had Jason and Travis Kelce, Disney had Patrick Mahomes and Saquon Barkley (I’ll leave it to keener NFL viewers than me to decide which was the better combo).
Part of the reason for Disney’s live sports push is the upcoming release of a new streaming service for its ESPN sports brand which will be called… ESPN. Like Channel 4 and Channel 5 in the UK, the branding embraces the idea that a broadcaster’s linear and streaming offerings needn’t be separated by a ‘+’. From a consumer’s point of view, they’re just different ways of accessing the same content. The new platform will run pass-through ads which also air on ESPN’s traditional channels, but will also offer CTV-specific opportunities.
Turning to ad tech, Disney touched on a few previous announcements, including its data collaboration platform Compass which it unveiled earlier this year, and the expansion of programmatic access to its live sports inventory. Ads chief Rita Ferro also highlighted Disney’s AI advertising tools, including its audience segment builder Disney Select AI Engine, its contextual targeting tool Magic Words, and the Experience Composer, which uses real-time insights to tweak ad creative.
YouTube: Cultural Moments Sponsorships and CTV Formats
YouTube’s positioning of its ‘Brandcast’ in Upfronts week highlights its play for TV ad spend (though it did also put in an appearance at the NewFronts this year). And CTV-specific formats, as well as TV-like content, were big focuses for the platform.
‘Cultural Moments Sponsorships’, for example, brings together a few of YouTube’s solutions to align advertisers with big moments, like the PGA Championship or awards season. YouTube also announced it will host the NFL’s Brazil-hosted game in kick-off week, making the stream available globally for free.
New formats highlighted by YouTube include ‘Peak Points’, a product which uses Google’s Gemini AI to run ads against the moments within content where audiences are most engaged. CTV-specific formats ‘Masthead on CTV’, and large format on YouTube’s CTV home screen, and ‘Shoppable CTV’, where viewers can browse and engage with products on their TV sets, also received mentions.
Highlights from the NewFronts
Meta: New Reels Ads, a Creator Marketplace, and Video on Threads
If Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the ad industry comes to pass, the NewFronts (and perhaps Upfronts) may soon be redundant: you’ll simply hand Meta your bank card, and they’ll do the rest. For the time being however, the company still sees fit to pitch its wares to advertisers. A lot of Meta’s news this year centred on creator-led products, capitalising on the popularity of short-form video with advertisers and audiences alike.
On Reels, Meta’s TikTok-like short-form video, the company is testing ‘Reels Trending Ads’, which places ads next to “the most popular, engaging creator-created Reels” across its platforms, according to the company. The tool sounds very similar to TikTok’s ‘Pulse’ product. Advertisers will be able to filter based on category, and Meta will offer brand safety and suitability controls (made all the more important by Meta’s wider rollback of content moderation). Meanwhile a new product in Instagram’s Creator Marketplace, Trends, will help brands identify trending topics to shape their own content.
Also within the Creator Marketplace, Meta will begin testing a Discovery API to make it easier for brands to identify relevant creators to work with on the platform, and to find key information on each creator’s performance and past partnerships. Elsewhere, Meta announced new partnership options for Facebook Live, and touched on its recent launch of video ads in its Twitter-like platform Threads.
Condé Nast: Centring Video and Expanding Contextual Targeting
Condé Nast’s NewFront event saw the publisher pivot from its usual public-facing presentation to an intimate dinner (the kind that features Jon Hamm and Anna Wintour), celebrating the 100th anniversary of its iconic magazine The New Yorker. It also marked the first NewFront under CRO Elizabeth Herbst-Brady, who joined the business from Yahoo last year, and emphasised the importance of video to the media company. She said the publisher’s premium content differentiates Condé Nast’s video offering, having generated 28 billion views in 2024, across long-form, short-form and film. The company also announced plans to expand its contextual targeting capabilities, according to Adweek, in preparation for changes to the privacy landscape.
The New York Times: Cooking Up New Video Series and Product Placement Opportunities
The New York Times returned to the NewFronts after a six-year hiatus, announcing that the New York Times Cooking app is “shifting into a video-rich, creator-forward platform”, with new video series including The Veggie, Cooking 101, and Weekends are for Baking. The publisher also introduced a new Friends tab on the New York Times Games app, allowing users to compare their Wordle and Connections scores, alongside a new logic-based game called ‘Pips’. For sports brand The Athletic, the company unveiled a new vertical called ‘Peak’, which will focus on business in sport, including a new digital series hosted by Super Bowl champion Ndamukong Suh.
And on the ads front, the NYT trailed a new ad unit designed for brands and retailers on its product review site Wirecutter, which also launched a new line of beauty coverage. Other new ad products included a Sponsored Access opportunity for brands to sponsor articles and recipes in News and Cooking, as well as Product Placement in video content across Cooking and The Athletic. The publisher added that Product Carousel and Expandable Video Units were coming soon, while expanding its BrandMatch targeting tool, which uses generative AI to match brands to relevant content and audiences in News, to also include The Athletic, Cooking, Wirecutter and Games.
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