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Executives upfront about upfront season: It’s going to be great

This year’s upfront ad sales market is going to be unusually strong, according to most ad sales executives contacted for this column. Sports programming is set up to be the main driver in this red-hot market.

In fact, NBCUniversal Chief Executive Steve Burke sounded like just about every other TV executive last week when he predicted that this year’s upfront ad sales marketplace would be strong. He said he expects to see advertising money that had gone to digital come back to television this year.

“Digital has a place.
But television has a big place.”

Steve Burke
Chief Executive, NBCUniversal

Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
“People have come to the realization that broad television reach is really important to an [advertising] campaign,” Burke said during Comcast’s quarterly earnings call. “Digital has a place. But television has a big place.”

The reason for Burke’s optimism comes down to sports. NBC will have two of the most discussed sports packages this year: the Summer Olympics and the network’s debut with Thursday night NFL games during the Christmas selling season. And that’s not even taking into account television’s top prime-time series: “Sunday Night Football.”

Fox’s ad sales president, Toby Byrne, is also optimistic, saying that his network’s early upfront conversations have been encouraging, with upfront sports sales focusing on fall sports like the NFL, college football and baseball. Fox has the World Series in October and the Super Bowl early next year, which will help ad sales.

Keith Turner, Univision’s president of advertising sales and marketing, said he expected this year’s market to be stronger because of the cyclical nature of the market. Last year’s upfront was weaker when many ad buyers held their ad schedules for the later scatter market. That led to a scatter market that was much tighter than ad buyers were expecting.

“That’s always the cycle,” said Turner, who has held senior positions with the NFL and NBC. “People that held back from the upfront got burned in scatter. Then people that held it for scatter didn’t have enough left over for the upfront. It’s a continuous cycle. The feeling is that scatter was pretty robust across the board. For indicators that you look at, that probably means that more people are going to want to commit in the upfront to protect against that happening again.”

Like NBC with the NFL, Univision’s upfront selling pitch is going to be focused on sports — “a different kind of football,” Turner joked.

Starting about five years ago, Univision began focusing on acquiring more sports rights as a way to grow the network. At this year’s upfront event, the network will highlight a large swath of soccer rights, including this summer’s Copa America Centenario and top U.S. and Mexican national team matches. Next year, it holds rights to the Gold Cup, followed in 2018 with the UEFA Nations League and European World Cup qualifying matches.

“For us, it’s soccer, soccer and a little bit more soccer,” he said. “We have some program deals that we do with the NBA and the NHL, but they’re not game specific. It’s more shoulder-programming opportunities. We’re really all about soccer.”

TURNER
That soccer programming has become a huge part of Univision’s ad sales strategy.

“I put our sports right up against the telenovelas and all our other product in terms of importance,” Turner continued. “[Univision’s sports channel] UDN is the fastest-growing broadcast outlet out there. We grew the advertiser base by 40 percent. Between UDN and all of that soccer, that’s probably 1 or 1A with our telenovelas as to what’s more important.”

Univision will use the theme of “United We Stand, Together We Grow” at this year’s upfront presentation in New York later this month. The presentation will focus on four areas: sports, telenovelas, comedy and music.

“Regional Mexican music is the single biggest growing music opportunity in this country regardless of language,” Turner said. “That’s going to be a big deal for us.”

Turner said that his biggest hurdle is convincing U.S. advertisers of the importance of having a Spanish-language advertising strategy.

“My competition is the English-language networks — I want all of those sponsors and advertisers,” he said. “It’s still an education process for us. We still have to convince a certain number of advertisers and marketers about the value of this segment.”

John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.

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