Some of the big media companies are starting to wrap up their upfront ad sales.
Speaking at the Credit Suisse investor conference Tuesday, NBCU CEO Jeff Shell said “we’re pretty much done, just a smattering of things still finishing up.”
Also at the conference, Paramount CEO Bob Bakish said his company was 80% to 90% done doing deals.
Shell said that NBCU was getting prices in the high-single digit range. He said the company had expected mid-single digit increases. “So I’m thrilled about that,” he said.
Volume for NBCU was comparable to last year.
“We’re kind of in the same range of dollars as we did last year” Shell said. “What basically happened is the declines in viewership and distribution due to cord cutting and everything else was offset by pricing and Peacock at our company.”
Peacock was getting CPM that were at the broadcast level, he said.
“It validates the business model we chose, a dual revenue stream to match kind of the core business,” Shell said, tweaking Netflix and Disney Plus, which are in the process of getting into the ad business. “And then obviously, everybody else who we were chasing before is now jumping into the pool behind us saying, ‘Oh, yes, we like this model, too.' So it's great and it feels good to be where we are.”
Bakish said that at this point in the upfront, broadcast CPMs up by high single digits.
“Interesting, we’re in the high singles for cable too. Historically cable has lagged broadcast, tucked in under it,” he said. “We’re delivering high singles on both and that’s a reflection of the quality of our product, but also the way we were bringing it to market.”
He said on the digital side, Paramount was seeing a volume play. “Oir volume is up materially and I think it's driven by some of our competition doing some things that are probably too aggressive on the linear pricing sides because we've seen agencies add digital volume as the upfronts gone on,” he said..
Bakish said the market was being affected by economic headwinds.
“We are seeing some categories that are affected by things like supply chain and inflation,,” he said, adding “but we're also seeing some categories they're doing well, quite frankly, travel, movies, sports and y political. That'll certainly be a huge plus in the second half of the year. There's a lot going on in the political environment that will feed the need for advertising. So we're quite happy about that.”
Fox CFO Steve Tomsic, also speaking at the Credit Suisse conference, said that is Fox moves towards the end of its upfront deals, the company has “achieved all the goals we set out for ourselves.”
He said price increases were in the mid-single digital to low double-digit range.
Fox was getting commitment from buyers that were “north of where we were at this time last year,” he said. “Just as importantly, apart from doing it for all of our traditional media mix, we’ve been able to get really, really strong increases in commitments for Tubi.” ■
