Upfront week is over, but all the latest season’s trends are still the talk of the Ton.

From publishers like Netflix bringing advertisers into the worlds of their shows, such as Bridgerton, to the continued shifting marketplace for sports—and whatever is happening with measurement—we’re keeping an eye on all the storylines brands and marketers should follow.

At ADWEEK, we’ve spoken to ad leaders from all the upfront week presenters, including Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, and more, and here are some of the top trends to watch as upfront season unfolds:

Agentic is already impacting advertising

Agentic was a hot topic throughout upfront presentations, as companies showcased new offerings, including Fox’s new AdStudio bringing agentic media planning and buying in the coming months. Plus, Netflix will have a new suite of AI tools, with AI agents autonomously managing and optimizing purchases on the platform.

Though different companies have different definitions of what agentic looks like—whether that be agents managing budgets on their own or programmatic becoming more efficient—the goal is to make things seamless for customers, according to Robert Voltaggio, president of ad sales, platform monetization, Warner Bros. Discovery.

“It’s very important for us in terms of, again, the evolution of our tech stack, to not only meet the market where it stands today, but be agile and nimble enough to meet the market where it’s going. And I think agentic AI is, at the very core, that’s what it’s really used for,” Voltaggio said.

However, it’s also worth noting that today’s agentic may not necessarily look like tomorrow’s.

“If I could bet anything, I would say that our view of it right now will probably be very different in three years as the space evolves,” Amy Reinhard, president of advertising, Netflix, recently told ADWEEK.

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Key World Cup Trends to Watch

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The continued evolution of the sports marketplace

Sports was a big topic for all the ad sales chiefs, and, according to buyers, it will continue driving the upfront this year.

“Five or six years ago, sports used to represent 30% to 35% of the upfront volume that was being transacted,” one media buyer told ADWEEK, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Now it’s well over 50% and might be closer to 60% this year.”

The market continues to grow as advertisers follow the eyeballs, and with that, deals are evolving.

For instance, Disney is rolling out a year-long celebration of the Super Bowl, creating new shoulder programming and ad opportunities to have brands constantly involved in the lead-up to the Big Game. In addition, according to Disney’s ads leader Rita Ferro, the company is getting an “unbelievable” amount of asks for the Big Game and is thinking beyond just dollars as it looks to diversify the lineup of advertisers.

“We want to make sure that there’s a variety of advertisers in the show, but also advertisers who are thinking about the creative because it’s really important as we work with our partners at the NFL to make sure that it reflects the audiences that are watching, and those are diverse audiences across many products and categories,” Ferro recently told us.

Meanwhile, how viewers consume sports is also evolving, as well as the ad opportunities around that consumption. For instance, Netflix has the upcoming Women’s World Cup in 2027. The company has included integrations throughout its live sports programming with advertisers and its own brands, and Reinhard told ADWEEK that you can expect that to continue to grow.

“There are so many advertisers who want to be a part of those moments,” Reinhard said. “So expanding the brand partnerships, as we’ve done on a lot of our great content, and weaving some of those authentic moments into the games or into the shoulder programming that we do around the Women’s World Cup.”

Leaning into outcomes-based measurement

Adtech was top of mind during upfront week, with NBCUniversal even kicking off its presentation with an extensive segment dedicated to its Performance Insights Hub to give advertisers a more holistic view of data across linear and streaming.

“If people are really just looking at streaming in isolation, even in the premium video marketplace, they’re missing three out of four impressions,” Mark Marshall, NBCU’s ads chief, previously told us.

It’s just the latest step as advertisers focus on more outcomes and audiences rather than demos. And though buyers told us Nielsen will continue to be a major player in the ecosystem, different measurement methods are creating necessary alternatives.

“More and more of our conversations are rooted in, instead of Adults 25 to 54, it’s show me your in-market auto intenders. Show me your first-time home buyers. Show me the chief household officer who you know manages grocery lists,” Ryan Gould, president of ad sales and client partnerships, Warner Bros. Discovery, said.

Harnessing fandom for brand-om

In a fragmented marketplace, fandom drives eyeballs and consumer sentiment, and publishers are all-in.

“Fandom is what our movies drive, what our sports drive, our shows,” Ferro told us, noting that Disney built its whole presentation around fandom as a theme.

Throughout the upfront events, companies such as Disney, Netflix, and Amazon pitched ways to get brands closer to the content, whether that’s through new offerings like AI integrating brands into the worlds of shows or custom campaigns built around IP.

Look for that trend to continue as the lines between content and commercial blur.

“Custom creative and brand partnerships are a significant part of our upfront deals for brands that want to go beyond the spot and become part of the content itself,” Alan Moss, Amazon vp of global ad sales, recently said.

We’re living through one of the most fragmented periods in media and cultural history, and because of that, people are returning to real‑world experiences with more desire, emotion, and urgency than ever before. 

In a world where everything can be watched on delay, FOMO has taken on a deeper meaning. 

From stadiums to concerts to brand pop‑ups, fans want to do more than see it. They want to experience it for themselves in real-time. 

This is especially visible in sport, where global sporting attendance has surpassed pre-pandemic demand. 

The live fan experience—the emotions, atmosphere, and cultural layers—have gone from being add-ons to becoming part of the core offering. 

At The Masters, fans didn’t just want to watch Rory McIlroy defend his title, they wanted to be part of the historic moment, from the immaculate course, the rituals, and the green-jacket ceremony—all of which create exclusivity and occasion. That experience is what makes Augusta a cultural moment that extends beyond its world-class golf.

The organizations that win next won’t be the loudest ones, but the ones who can reimagine consumer experiences by blending sport, entertainment, hospitality, technology, and community into something that feels less like an event and more like stepping into a new world.

David Ogilvy once said: “If you can’t be brilliant, at least be memorable.” 

In the live experience revival, memorability is the ultimate differentiator. People don’t return for functional experiences alone, they return for emotional ones. 

And this shift isn’t confined to sport. Luxury brands are building pop‑ups that feel like temporary universes. Ralph Lauren, Dior, and Rhode are just a few of many who are turning stores into experiences, galleries, and social spaces. Music artists are designing tours that live as cultural moments, not concerts. 

The common thread? People want experiences that feel intentional, entertaining, and worth their time. 

AI will undoubtedly play a role in this evolution. It will help personalize journeys, anticipate needs and remove friction. However, it will still be the human moments that people remember—the arrival, the atmosphere, the unexpected interaction and the shared emotions—none of which can be automated. 

Memories and moments have become the most valuable currency in modern fandom. They’re what people talk about, post about and return for.

For CMOs, this creates both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is to design experiences that deepen emotional connection and unlock new forms of loyalty. The challenge is that this requires a different mindset—one that prioritizes meaning and creativity, resonance over reach, and long‑term brand equity over short‑term optimization.

It also requires courage. The courage to invest in creativity. The courage to elevate the physical experience. The courage to design for belonging rather than attendance. Because capturing future fandom—whether in sport, entertainment, retail, or hospitality – isn’t just about scale, it’s about creating experiences that people want to return to, belong to, and can’t help but champion.

Fans don’t want a seat. They want a story. And they’ll choose the brands that make them feel something over the brands that simply show them something.

Driven by the intersection of sport, style and entertainment, SailGP is launching its latest hospitality experience this month at the Mubadala New York Sail Grand Prix. VELA Prive represents a new era of waterfront culture – a beach club concept designed to bring fans closer to the racing, where world-class sport, elevated hospitality, culture and entertainment all come together in a unique new offering.

In the spring of 2023, Axios Local hit the brakes. 

The network of local newsletters had spread to 30 markets in under three years, but it had missed its revenue goal, was unprofitable, and decided to stop expanding until it could prove the markets it already entered could make money.

Three years later, expansion has resumed. The program is now on track to be in 43 markets by the end of the year, nearly halfway to its eventual goal of 100 metro areas. The Local business is generating “tens of millions” in revenue with multiple profitable markets, and last week it quietly hit its first-half revenue goal, according to chief operating officer Allison Murphy. 

Overall, Axios beat its first-half revenue target earlier this month, capping a fourth straight year of double-digit growth, although it declined to share further financial specifics. As a whole, the company is profitable.

The company, which launched in 2017 and was acquired by Cox Enterprises in August 2022 for $525 million, has reached these milestones by being an early adopter of a strategy that has since come to be widely emulated. 

By targeting niche, professional audiences without adopting a widespread paywall, the publisher has been able to sell advertisers on a compelling blend of scale and influence, according to chief revenue officer Jacquelyn Cameron. Its embrace of newsletters, from which it has since expanded, also insulated the news brand from the traffic declines now upending publishers whose businesses were built on the open web. 

“We have proven that there is more power and opportunity in 535 than 535,000,” Cameron said, referencing the number of members of Congress. “Premium or die.”

That philosophy is visible across the national business. Advertising still accounts for the vast majority of revenue, the bulk of which is sold directly to clients and increasingly anchored in thought leadership aimed at five distinct audience profiles. In May, CEO and founder Jim VandeHei launched an application-only newsletter for C-suite executives that has already grown past 4,000 readers and will exit beta in June with an underwriter attached.

The events business, Axios Live, is growing more than 30% year over year and now generates tens of millions of dollars, according to Cameron. Its sizable presence at Cannes Lions in June will generate 50% more revenue than 2025 and be profitable for a second consecutive year. 

None of that, on its own, distinguishes Axios from the rest of the premium cohort. News outlets ranging from Semafor to The Wall Street Journal have introduced exclusive newsletters, and business-facing events have proliferated thanks to their value as physical touchpoints for enterprise marketing. 

The harder, more distinctive bet is on addressing the local news crisis, an economic challenge that few news brands have sought to solve, let alone even attempt. 

Now, the company is betting that artificial intelligence will change that calculus, and the centerpiece of the gamble is an expanded partnership with OpenAI. 

The original deal, struck in January 2025, provided cash that enabled Axios to hire reporters and absorb the startup costs of new markets, along with providing the publisher enterprise access and a large allotment of usage tokens, according to Murphy. 

In exchange, OpenAI gets permission to use Axios content for training and access to its feed for retrieval. The first phase funded four cities. The second round, announced this January, will support an additional seven to nine, according to Murphy.

Crucially, the new markets look different from the old ones. Where Axios once entered the largest metro areas with two or three reporters apiece, it is now expanding into smaller, one-reporter geographies—places like Boulder and Colorado Springs—and grouping them into regions, or “local supersystems,” to build awareness and reach sustainability faster.

The shared infrastructure makes this phase of expansion more viable, as the technology costs of adding another reporter to a preexisting system are minimal.

In addition to its funding from OpenAI, Axios is also using its technology to build out a fleet of AI-enabled tools.

Similar to a content-management system, this platform gives every reporter a personalized daily feed of their community’s news and a suite of automations, from data visualization to “localizer” technology that adapts a story written for Austin to run in Dallas. The full version of the platform is expected to be operational in September, when the local team holds its annual retreat.

And while other media brands work to coax staff into embracing AI, at Axios the buy-in has been largely enthusiastic. When the outlet sought 15 internal AI champions, Murphy said, 100 employees volunteered. One reporter used Claude Code to generate 43 versions of a single data chart, one for each community. 

“You are either on the bus or you are not at this point,” Murphy said.

Still, Axios is careful to frame Local as an investment business rather than a finished success. 

The national business has been profitable for years; Local has multiple profitable markets and is hitting its margin benchmarks, but the portfolio as a whole is not yet profitable. Subscriptions—roughly 15,000 paying members across Local—will only ever be part of the mix; Murphy estimates they may one day reach 25% to 30% of local revenue.

And even if the unit economics ultimately work, a more fundamental question hangs over the model: whether it actually addresses the local news crisis it positions itself against. 

Chris Krewson, executive director of LION Publishers, a trade association for independent local newsrooms, argues that the Axios Local model depends on the availability of original reporting that it does not itself produce as a standard newsroom would. 

As a result, the company is “additive” only in a narrow commercial sense, in that it captures advertising dollars in markets it previously could not access.

“Axios Local is generally not investing in shoe-leather beat reporting and spade work,” Krewson said, “because it would take too many people, and that’s too expensive.”

Holly Moore, the executive editor of Axios Local, pushed back on that characterization, saying that the majority of content produced in the newsletters is original or sourced from a centralized team that identifies and localizes nationwide trends.

Either way, five years in and the project still remains a gamble. The supersystem may finally make premium local news pencil out. Or it might just reach the same plateau Axios hit before, only this time with better tooling.

The quick summary:

At its television upfront on Monday, Fox kept its pitch tight and on-message: The television ecosystem might be convoluted, but Fox is focused. 

The entertainment brand drew attention to what ad sales chief Jeff Collins referred to as its “first principles,” borrowing a line from Silicon Valley to convey its dedication to a streamlined portfolio of assets: live sports, live news, entertainment, and ad-supported streaming.

The presentation, held at the New York City Center in Manhattan, centered primarily on Fox’s content slate, with extra emphasis on the upcoming Men’s World Cup, Tubi’s continued growth, and a newly fleshed-out ad stack.

The biggest announcements:

The night’s biggest tech story was Fox Fan OS.

According to chief technology officer Melody Hildebrandt, the platform is an “agentic AI-native media operating system” built on two connected platforms: Fox Fan Studio, which powers consumer experiences, and Fox AdStudio, which connects brands to those audiences. 

Fox runs AI inference against every second of its raw video in real time, extracting topic, talent, mood, and vibes, before comparing those insights against performance data to understand what resonates with fans, Hildebrandt said. 

AdStudio offers advertisers a converged audience graph, a contextual engine for scene-level targeting, and full-funnel measurement across more than 20 data partners, with the ability to plug directly into brands’ own AI agents.

Meanwhile, Tubi CEO Anjali Sud made the case that the free streamer is now scaled enough to anchor an upfront pitch on its own. 

Tubi has 100 million monthly active users watching more than 10 billion hours a year, and ranks fourth among streamers for reaching high-income cord-cutter viewers, ahead of Disney+ and Paramount, according to Sud. 

Third-party measurement showed that Tubi delivered 91% incremental reach versus the same campaigns running on linear, and the platform is rolling out new ad formats, including pause-to-participate units and shoppable in-scene placements. 

Tubi also touted category-level performance lifts: 21% for retail, 37% for QSR, 25% for auto, and roughly a 4:1 ROAS for CPG.

Sports, predictably, dominated the back half of the presentation. 

Fox is just weeks out from the FIFA World Cup, with 70 matches on Fox, 34 on FS1, and all 104 matches streaming on Fox One, the company’s streaming service. 

Comedian James Corden took the stage to announce a new program, After Hours with James Corden, a late-night recap of the day’s matches hosted alongside former England captain Rio Ferdinand and comedian Ian Karmel. 

Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski, and Erin Andrews closed the show on the NFL slate, which includes a Week 10 NFL tripleheader with a Germany game, and Thanksgiving and Christmas Day matchups. The MLB also got a marquee push, with Derek Jeter, David Ortiz, and Alex Rodriguez out to promote the All-Star Game, NLCS, and World Series.

On the entertainment side, Fox brought out the cast of its Baywatch reboot, previewed dramas including Memory of a Killer, Doc, and Best Medicine, and announced The Interrogator, a new drama starring Stephen Fry and Jenna Elfman. 

And Fox Creative Studios, a new IP-development arm partnering with creators across genres, was introduced by Gordon Ramsay and Johnny Knoxville, who’s also hosting a new Fear Factor.

Fox News, meanwhile, used its slot to argue it’s outgrown the cable label. Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum noted the network is averaging 3.1 million viewers in weekday prime—beating NBC—and that the Fox News website pulls 143 million monthly unique visitors and generated 4.5 billion YouTube views in the past year.

Why it matters:

Fox’s pitch ran almost counter to the prevailing upfront playbook of more, more, more. 

CEO Lachlan Murdoch told the room the company doesn’t “pursue scale just for scale’s sake,” and Collins’ first-principles keynote was rooted in the idea that Fox stripped its business down to reach, engagement, and performance and rebuilt from there. 

For a marketplace where buyers are increasingly skeptical of buzzwords and fragmentation, the tidy framing is meant to read as a competitive advantage.

The harder sell was the tech story. With Fox AdStudio, the company is now claiming over 1,000 advertiser campaigns measured through the platform with double-digit lifts on outcomes like in-store sales and foot traffic. 

Pairing that with Hildebrandt’s pitch is Fox’s attempt to keep pace with NBCUniversal and Disney’s outcomes-and-AI stories without compromising its “we don’t chase scale” positioning. Whether buyers see AdStudio as differentiated or as table stakes will shape how Fox lands in this year’s market.

The other through-line is the World Cup, which is less than two months away. Collins told ADWEEK last week that the vast majority of World Cup inventory has already cleared, and the upfront stage was largely a victory lap. 

But the company’s ability to deliver on the United States’ first World Cup in 30 years is the credibility test that the rest of its 2026 sales pitch will ride on.

The quick summary

The event itself wasn’t very “Fast and Furious,” but NBCUniversal covered a lot of ground in its 2026 upfront week kickoff.

With a presentation that lasted around two hours, NBCU put a modern spin on its 100 years as a legacy media brand. Las Culturistas’ Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang opened with a song-and-dance routine about NBC ads before Mark Marshall, NBCU’s ad sales chief, took the stage to announce new adtech and outcomes offerings.

The company also noted how it’s evolving its brands, including creating Fast and Furious spinoffs for Peacock and bringing unscripted microdramas to Bravo.

But even with all its entertainment and news offerings, sports ultimately won the day, with NBCU touting its Sunday night sports, the World Cup, and even some NFL news.

The biggest announcements

Adtech was one of the stars of NBCU’s upfront event, with highlights including the company scaling its Performance Insights Hub in Q4 2026 to provide advertisers with a unified view of campaign delivery, insights, and performance across linear and streaming.

The company also announced Live Total Impact, a tool to leverage brand messaging in live events and re-target viewers across NBCU’s portfolio on both digital and linear. According to NBCU, State Farm generated over 90% incremental lift in insurance quote starts while utilizing the tech.

Bringing more contextual ad capabilities to its offerings, NBCU announced Live Contextual will debut in Q4 as an AI-powered solution that allows brands to align creative messaging with live content. For instance, Bounty could showcase its paper towels in an ad to clean up the mess after an NFL fumble.

The company is also enhancing its agentic AI capabilities, with always-on interoperable AI agents expected to be available by the start of the broadcast year to automate transactions, surface intelligence, and enable smarter decisions.

Beyond tech, NBC and Peacock are looking to score big with sports.

With 30 days to go until the Men’s World Cup, Telemundo announced a sellout of all key positions and sponsorships. In addition, NBCU and Telemundo will enable the 2026 FIFA World Cup programmatically, helping provide incremental access through digital ad insertion (DAI).

During the presentation, NBC reiterated that it has a game plan to keep sports going all year, with sports-heavy Sunday nights, featuring Sunday Night Football, Sunday Night Basketball, and Sunday Night Baseball. NBCU is also airing the entire Wild Card round of the MLB postseason, the WNBA regular season and playoffs, and more. Plus, NBC and Peacock are adding a third NFL game for Week 17.

Entertainment-wise, NBCU brought out Vin Diesel to announce four new Fast and Furious spinoffs for Peacock. In addition, NBC revealed four other series, including Line of Fire, The Rockford Files, Newlyweds, and Sunset P.I.

Meanwhile, a new season of The Traitors will air on Thursdays, and Tina Fey took the stage to help promote the company’s three-hour 100th anniversary special, which will air on Dec. 10.

For Bravo fans, Andy Cohen announced that BravoCon is returning in the fall of 2027. In the meantime, Bravo’s Fan Fest is coming to Charleston, South Carolina, on Oct. 24. The brand is also getting into vertical microdramas, with unscripted shows like Campus Confidential: Miami and Salon Confessionals with Madison LeCroy.

To close the show, Seth Meyers provided some light roasting of the other networks, including rival CBS.

“CBS did not hold an upfront presentation this year because at CBS, ‘upfront’ just describes how they paid Trump to drop the lawsuit,” Meyers said.

Why it matters

Heading into upfront week, media buyers were clamoring for sports, streaming, and outcomes, which was basically the playbook for NBCU’s upfront presentation.

Though the company presented plenty of scripted entertainment series, including Jamie Lee Curtis comedy Newlyweds and Vin Diesel’s Fast spinoffs, the offerings reflected a changing upfront, which is more focused on delivering appointment-viewing sports to a fragmented TV landscape and showing the effect of advertising rather than just touting reach.

“On [NBC’s] 100th anniversary, our legacy is our greatest competitive advantage. It’s built on evolution, innovation, and a relentless focus on consumer behavior,” Marshall said onstage.

To last 100 years, NBC has had to evolve, and the latest evolution may just set the tone for the whole upfront.

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The skip button doesn’t apply to Netflix ads.

Around three and a half years after launching its ad business, Netflix is on pace to double its ad revenue for the second year in a row, set to reach $3 billion in 2026. In addition, its ads plan represents more than 60% of sign-ups in countries with the tier, and its programmatic business has grown to nearly 50% of its advertising as it has added DSP partners like Yahoo and Amazon.

As the company heads into its upfront event on May 13 in New York City, ads leader Amy Reinhard says the streaming giant is prepping to make its mark.

“We’ve been building over the past couple of years, and I would say that this upfront for us is really our stamp that we can compete with anyone,” Reinhard told ADWEEK. “And on a global basis, just really excited about how far the business has come and how much more opportunity there is for us.”

Those opportunities include the streamer’s massive live events on the way, including the third year of Netflix’s 3-year deal with the NFL for Christmas Day games and the Women’s World Cup coming in 2027. Plus, the company has increased its ad integrations in recent years, with brands having increasingly integral roles in its content.

Speaking with ADWEEK, Reinhard previewed the company’s upfront pitch, shared its strategy around the Women’s World Cup, and noted that more brand integrations and partnerships are on the way.

ADWEEK: What are the priorities heading into the upfront?

Reinhard: The biggest priority is just the communication of the fact that we’re three and a half years into this journey, and we’re really excited about this year. A year ago, we launched our adtech stack, and I truly feel like our offering to the market now is that marriage of art and science—marrying the best content, and now having our adtech be in a position where we can compete with everybody else in terms of our data tools, our planning capabilities, and really offering great solutions to the marketplace. I feel really good about where we are a year into launching this tech stack.

Speaking of that, at the last earnings call, the CEOs said the programmatic business is almost 50% of the ads business. How do you see that continuing to grow?

Yeah, it has been fantastic growth, considering we just launched that pretty recently. Ultimately, we want to meet buyers where they’re at, so we started out as a direct business, and we still have a very healthy direct relationship with a lot of our key advertisers. And if that’s the way that people want to work with us, fantastic. But ultimately, we just want to make sure that it’s easy to buy with us. For those who are in the programmatic space, how can we make it easier for them? How can we expand the data and measurement capabilities and give our partners more ways to buy? So you see that with the launches of Yahoo and Amazon over the last year.

This is the second year in a row you’re set to double ad sales revenue. What do you attribute that to? Also, do you ever get to chill, or are you just doubling every year?

It is a really fun time to be in this business, and it helps when we’ve got such a fantastic content slate that really helps drive that. A key part of our success has been these live events that we’ve been doing. We’ve got a couple coming up soon. We’ve got a roast with Kevin Hart. We’ve got a fight between [Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano] next weekend. The fights have been fantastic for us. The NFL business is really good for us.

But then you look at the live events that we did around the world, like the World Baseball Classic in Japan. That really kick-started our business in Japan. I look at events like the Alex Honnold climb in Taiwan, those being at that intersection of culture and interests. The live piece has really helped us grow the business.

This is the last year of the 3-year NFL deal for Christmas games. Do you see that relationship continuing?

I do see that relationship continuing in the future. We’ve had great interest in those games, and I think what we’ve been able to do around eventizing the games that we’ve had—we’ve had really fantastic halftime shows as part of those events on Christmas Day. I would look to see more of that continuing. 

And you have the Women’s World Cup in 2027, what can you say about early negotiations and your strategy?

It’s very similar to the other sporting events that we’ve had. The tournament nature of that World Cup—and we will see a preview of that this year in the Men’s World Cup—but there are so many advertisers who want to be a part of those moments. So expanding the brand partnerships, as we’ve done on a lot of our great content, and weaving some of those authentic moments into the games or into the shoulder programming that we do around the Women’s World Cup. I would say those are the types of opportunities that get brands really excited, and get us excited as well. So it’s going to be a really fantastic couple of months for us, and there’s a lot of interest going into the upfronts around brands that want to get involved in the wave that is women’s sports right now.

Last year, we saw Emily in Paris/Lily Collins make an appearance at the upfront, pitching the audience as an ad executive. Is Emily returning? And what can you tell us about the presentation on May 13?

It is definitely going to be star-studded. We are going to roll out the red carpet for a lot of great talent, and obviously leaning into the great slate that we have coming up. [Bela Bajaria, Netflix chief content officer]; [Nicolle Pangis, vp, Netflix Advertising, UCAN]; and I will be taking the stage, all coming at it from different angles. I’ll be giving an overview of where we’re at on a global basis; Bella will be getting into our content; and then Nicole will be driving it home with our advancements on the data and the tech side in the U.S., and lots of really fun moments in between. You may or may not see an appearance by Emily in Paris. I think it’s going to be a really fun time.

Last upfront, you talked about using AI to get advertisers closer to the content. Can you talk about the importance there? What are advertisers gravitating toward?

Absolutely, our partners want to be close to the content. I think we’ve done a really good job with our brand partnerships in the past. When you look at things that we’ve done—and you wrote an article about this—on Running Point with State Farm and Sephora, or Bridgerton and Dove. All of the brand partnerships that we’ve done over the past year, we’re only doing more of those and bigger integrations as we get closer to those brands. And then when you think about the expansion of our live slate, and how many new opportunities that brings to the forefront, look to see a lot more of those integrations and partnerships going forward.

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