Upfronts season is officially upon us, and on Monday, NBCU talent and execs are slated to kick off the week by taking the stage at Radio City Music Hall to make their official pitch to advertisers.
And while a cloud of economic uncertainty looms over NewFronts and upfronts this year, it’s nothing the industry hasn’t seen before.
“We’ve navigated uncertainty before,” Gina Reduto, NBCU’s EVP of strategy, told Marketing Brew. “We’ve endured recessions. We’ve made it through the pandemic.”
For media giants including NBCU, resilience is part of the game. This year, TV networks that have worked to rearrange their businesses around streaming are heading into what could be a challenging upfronts market, where economic volatility coupled with tariff-related business challenges stand to threaten top-of-the-funnel marketing efforts.
In the past few months, NBCU has teased new ad products, introduced new programming, and brought on its first dedicated streaming ad sales exec, and the week ahead is all about emphasizing how its content coupled with measurement can help brands stand out with consumers.
Ahead of NBCUniversal’s presentation on Monday, Marketing Brew chatted with Reduto to talk about the company’s advertising priorities leading into and beyond upfronts.
What tariffs? Economic uncertainty is high at the moment, Reduto said, and the Trump administration’s changing tariff policies have thrown marketing plans for many goods affected by the new taxes into disarray. While brands may have the impulse to focus on bottom-of-the-funnel marketing, Reduto emphasized that leveraging premium video can support long-term brand-building that makes “existing media work harder.”
Like other TV companies, NBCU is emphasizing that measurement and attribution tools could help advertisers feel more confident about their investments at a time when uncertainty is high.
Feel it (and measure it) all: To further attract ad dollars, NBCU is rolling out several updates it first announced at this year’s CES. The broadcaster is bringing “emotional metadata” capabilities to its inventory later this year, which uses AI and machine learning to align ad creative alongside NBCU content that’s aimed at targeting mid- and lower-funnel conversion. (The company will have “more to share” on other AI-enabled advertising features down the road, Reduto said.)
Get marketing news you’ll actually want to read
Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.
NBCU is also recommending use of Ad-ID for creative ads, which are persistent identifiers that can help improve creative campaign measurement. And pause ads, which have become commonplace across the streaming industry in just a few years’ time, are also coming to NBC livestreams.
Sportier and sportier: NBCU has several upcoming major sports events in its programming calendar, including NBA games beginning in the fall, the 2026 Super Bowl, and the 2026 Olympics, which has historically been an ad sales boon: in 2024, NBCU netted a record $1.2 billion in ad revenue before the Games even began. Advertisers are already asking about opportunities to show up against the broadcaster’s upcoming sports content, Reduto said.
There is a growing opportunity for new advertisers to activate against sports programming in smaller commitments, including through programmatic buys, which came to the Olympics last year. Of the advertisers who bought the Olympics programmatically, 90% of them were new to the Games, Reduto said.
Beyond sports, there are also other programs the company hopes will have advertisers salivating. One of them is the unscripted marketing competition series On Brand with Jimmy Fallon, which will be hosted by the Tonight Show host. Already, at least nine brands, including Dunkin’, Marshalls, and Samsung, are on board as sponsors.
Big on small advertisers: Beyond programmatic updates, NBCU is working on finding ways to attract small- and medium-sized businesses. At CES in January, Comcast debuted Universal Ads, a self-service ad buying tool aimed at offering increased measurement and attribution capabilities to SMBs. The product rolled out with launch partners like Roku and Warner Bros. Discovery, and LG Ad Solutions and Vizio are among a new round of partners recently announced.
Those investments are designed to help SMBs, which may be more used to social advertising, become comfortable with TV as a medium.
NBCU has heard from smaller advertisers that it can be an “operational hurdle to buy premium video,” Reduto said, “and so those solutions are meant to deliver on that.”
Read the full article here
