Marco Giordani, CEO of ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE
German broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1 released its full-year earnings for 2025 this morning, which made for mixed reading. Total revenues were down by six percent (or two percent on an organic basis), while advertising revenues fell by eight percent in the German-speaking region. But the company hopes for an improvement in the TV advertising market in the second half of 2026, and is forecasting slight organic revenue growth.
Regardless of whether this growth materialises this year or not, the long-term challenges facing the broadcaster remain. CEO Marco Giordani, who took the helm following MFE’s acquisition of ProSieben last year, used his first earnings call with the company to lay out his turnaround plan. The goal will be driving total reach for ProSieben’s content, a strategy which will involve embracing third-party platforms — including the social media giants — while maintaining a differentiated sales approach.
Reach evolved
While reach has traditionally been the backbone of TV advertising, this has generally been confined to broadcasters’ linear offerings. But with linear viewing declining, ProSieben is taking a more expansive view of reach, looking at how many individuals engage with its content across channels, whether that’s on traditional TV, on its Joyn streaming platform, via a domestic or international distribution partner, or on one of the major international social platforms.
At a company-wide level, ProSieben says that total video reach in Germany will now be the most important non-financial KPI it presents. Last year, this figure averaged out at 61 million users per month.
Linear TV still remains key in this model. But Giordani described it as the “base” of ProSieben’s reach, with its owned-and-operated digital platforms, local partners, social networks and international partners each adding extra cumulative reach on top. ProSieben will invest in content to maximise this reach, and to then sell multiplatform partnerships to brands which capitalise on this reach, rather than focusing on traditional TV spots.
The aim is to play to TV’s strengths, particularly in terms of how marketers perceive it. Giordani said total reach is the KPI marketers really care about with TV, since the social platforms already cater to their performance campaigns, but they still want to invest in branding and positioning through mass-reach campaigns.
Not just international scale
This focus on reach isn’t surprising. A big part of the motivation behind MFE’s acquisition of ProSieben is to create a pan-European media powerhouse with scale which can better rival that of the global tech giants.
And using the wider sales machinery owned by MFE is certainly part of the picture. Giordani highlighted that MFE Advertising will provide a single point of access for brands to run campaigns across MFE’s holdings, including ProSieben. This in turn will unlock access to international campaign budgets which otherwise would go elsewhere.
But domestic reach is also vital. In MFE’s home market Italy, the broadcaster still enjoys very high reach through its owned-and-operated properties, something which Giordani says will be hard to replicate in Germany. Working with partners for additional scale will therefore be key to the strategy.
This will require work on the ad sales front. Giordani namechecked a continued shift to CPM-based buying across linear and digital inventory, the development of a unified monetisation framework, investments in data and identity, and the use of AI to ease the burden of cross-platform creative production and power decision-making as areas of investment. Achieving this across ProSieben’s owned-and-operated channels is one thing (and indeed, is an area where the company has already made a lot of progress). Bringing other distribution partners along, especially the social platforms, may prove more difficult.
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