I spoke with NBCU ad chief Mark Marshall about his cameo in the roast, and he said it was all in good fun.
I haven’t talked to Mark yet—I have to call him! But I always say that if you make it onto a comedian’s hit list, you’ve made it. He’s a good friend and one of the funniest people I know, so I think he appreciates the comedy.
Jimmy did call out the lack of new programming on ABC—there’s only one new show on the fall schedule this year. Is that a sign of the times for broadcast television or more of a sign of the evolving nature of the upfront?
I think it’s a sign of how we’re thinking about programming, our cross-platform content strategy, and making sure that the shows that are going to the right platforms are the shows that make the most sense for those platforms. We’ve made a concerted effort over the last couple of months to focus on what is resonating with the audiences on ABC, and we’ve seen that live content or what appears to be live content continues to resonate tremendously—things like Dancing With the Stars, American Idol, and the Bachelor series.
The other thing, too, is that length-of-show was my number one priority this year. Because of the breadth and size of our portfolio, we’ve had two-and-a-half-hour shows in the past, and I wanted to pick a smattering of some of the best content to leave people wanting more. We landed at 80 minutes, and there was so much greatness—and even more greatness that didn’t make the stage.
Jimmy also had a good line about ESPN+ seeming more like a minus now that the new DTC streamer has been announced. What are the plans for that platform going forward?
We have a lot of rights deals across the marketplace that were done as part of ESPN+; the UFC is one of them, and also some of the college sports. That product will continue to exist because there is a marketplace for it—ESPN+ has over 30,000 hours of live events. But we are also prioritizing the triple bundle that includes ESPN, Hulu, and Disney+ with or without ads for consumers. We’re going to be very ambitious in terms of how we want to go to market with that product, with a promotional price at launch that will then ultimately evolve to the final price.
