NBCUniversal Wraps ‘Strongest’ Upfront in Company History

NBCUniversal has joined The CW by completing its negotiations for this year’s upfront. “We have a couple things to mop up, but we’re pretty much done,” NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell said Monday morning at the Credit Suisse Investor Conference. “It was the strongest upfront I think probably in the history of NBCUniversal,” said Shell. “We saw results in this upfront far beyond what we thought we’d see.” The company sold “about the same amount of inventory as last year” in the upfront, said Shell, who did not share any other specifics about the CPM (cost per thousand viewers reached) or volume increases that NBCUniversal secured in the upfront. NBCUniversal is the second media company to finish its upfront talks, following The CW, which crossed the finish line last Friday, landing hefty CPM increases. Linda Yaccarino, chairman, global advertising and partnerships, NBCUniversal, said in a statement that “this was the first upfront of a new age. A watershed moment and a clear signal that everything has changed.” Among the “permanent” shifts in the “converged” marketplace, said Yaccarino: “universal acceptance of trading principles that were unthinkable just a few short years ago: the commitment to meet our consumers where they are, across all screens.” The company emphasized the importance of trust during its upfront presentation last month, making the case that audiences trust NBCUniversal, which presents a major opportunity for advertisers looking to win those viewers over. Top upfront priorities One of NBCUniversal’s top upfront priorities, Mark Marshall, president, advertising and client partnerships, told Adweek last month, was “getting marketers to look at the benefits of what One Platform is. You don’t have to decide between linear and digital, you don’t have to decide between content or targeting, you don’t have to decide between engagement or technology. One Platform allows you to holistically move to where the audience is.” Its Peacock streaming service was another big upfront focus for the company. Shell told investors in April that in scatter, “we’re achieving CPMs that are equal or in some cases, above what we’re getting on NBC Prime, which is our gold standard,” and NBCUniversal also aggressively priced Peacock in the upfront. “We are looking at Peacock as really our third broadcast network,” after NBC and Telemundo, Marshall told Adweek. “Peacock, by fourth quarter of this year, will [have] the same reach as a broadcast network in primetime. It’s delivering that mass scale, but it’s also delivering a unique audience and a great ad environment. So it’s like being able to go back and buy NBC in the 1930s when it was starting. And that’s how we’re looking at Peacock: We do believe that this is a big part of the future of our company. And advertisers have a lot of demand against that so far.” NBCU’s Mark Marshall on Upfront Priorities and Aggressively Pricing Peacock In the upfront, NBCUniversal also spotlighted what the company called its Once in a Lifetime packages: its unusual back-to-back-to-back lineup of the Summer Olympics, Super Bowl 56, the Winter Olympics and next year’s World Cup. On the broadcast front, NBC’s fall schedule features a Thursday night that is entirely devoted to Law & Order franchises, while all of its comedies—as well as the sixth and final season of This Is Us—are being held until midseason. The company had high hopes going into this year’s upfront. “We went into it assuming this was going to be a strong marketplace,” said Marshall, explaining that the company anticipated five categories would grow $1 billion each: QSR, tech, auto, entertainment and pharma. “There’s going to be an abundance of not only new advertisers, but advertisers that are going to come back in much bigger ways than they had last year.”