NBCUniversal said it has completed its upfront, ringing up nearly $6.5 billion in advertising commitments for the next television season, an increase of 8% from last year.
The company, part of Comcast, said it was excluding the upcoming Super Bowl, Winter Olympics and World Cup from its calculations to provide an apples-to-apples comparison.
Ad prices on a cost-per-thousand viewers basis were up by high-single digits at both the NBC broadcast network across all dayparts as well as at the NBC cable entertainment networks, which includes USA and Syfy.
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For regular season NFL football game on Sunday and Thursday nights, sales volume was up 5%.
NBCU said digital video sales were up 42%. The company has also formed partnerships with digital media companies including Vox, Snapchat and Apple News. Revenue from those partnerships was up 68% to $125 million.
Over the past few years, NBCU has been touting the effectiveness of its Symphony approach to marketing, giving clients the opportunity to coordinate ad campaigns over all of NBCU’s broadcast, cable, digital, theme park and other assets. NBCU says Symphony commitments were up by 27%.
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NBCU also said its client partnership group, which works with directly with clients on strategies to wirth with the NBCU portfolio, helped bring in 26% more business this year than in last year’s upfront.
