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“Cautious,” “dragging,” and “weird”: From drawn-out negotiations to plummeting CPMs (cost per thousand viewers reached) and surprised publishers, buyers told ADWEEK that 2024 wasn’t a typical TV upfront.
According to several buyers familiar with talks, this year’s influx of streaming inventory from the likes of digital-first players and Amazon’s ad tier brought a seismic shift to the market.
In years past, publishers had pulled in skyrocketing CPMs and touted record-setting levels of dollar commitments, but the language has been tempered in the past couple of years of upfront close news. Although they are normally a staple of upfront announcements, publishers largely held back specifics on total volume and CPM rates of change.
Last year’s upfront was a buyer’s market, where Hollywood strikes brought uncertainty over programming and talks dragged on. Although this year’s was expected to also favor buyers, insiders told ADWEEK that the 2024-2025 negotiations were about more than just soft pricing.
“This was a reset year in connected TV,” one buyer told ADWEEK, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “It goes beyond rollbacks from a pricing standpoint, but really a reset.”
Here’s what buyers thought of the 2024-2025 upfront:
Buying the streaming dip
In past upfronts, deals could wrap up as early as June and July, but this year brought slow-moving talks, with dealmaking extending into late August. In overall volume, linear was down around 5% and streaming up around 7%, according to multiple buyers familiar with negotiations.
Although that resulted in a relatively flat market, buyers said CTV could rise even more by the end of the year. And that influx of CTV supply, as well as marketers looking to hold back budgets and seeking more flexible terms, has had drastic effects on pricing.
This year’s linear rollbacks generally matched last year’s of around 5%, according to five buyers. However, streaming brought even steeper discounts thanks to digital-first players such as YouTube, Roku, and even Netflix.