As upfront week presentations wrap, Adweek’s postmortem chats with every ad sales chief continue. We’ve already spoken with NBCUniversal’s Mark Marshall, Fox’s Marianne Gambelli, TelevisaUnivision’s Donna Speciale and Disney’s Rita Ferro. Next up is Warner Bros. Discovery’s Jon Steinlauf.
In its first full year as a merged company, Warner Bros. Discovery is about to unveil Max, the combined Discovery+ and HBO Max streaming service. And though streaming played a big role in the company’s Wednesday morning presentation at The Theater at Madison Square Garden, it also leaned heavily on unscripted, news and sports content, with only executives appearing on stage due to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike.
Steinlauf talked about the strike-prompted shift away from onstage talent (and why CEO David Zaslav was also MIA), the company’s Max streaming strategy and why—following a 2022 upfront where “we probably did not perform at the level of expectation” given that the WarnerMedia and Discovery merger closed just weeks ahead of talks—the company is in a much stronger position heading into this year’s negotiations.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Adweek: You made it through upfront week. Looking back, what are you most proud of from this year?
Steinlauf: I think what we were able to accomplish was a very seamless run-through for all of the content. My part of it, and my direct report Shereen Russell’s [evp, ad sales and inclusive content partnerships] part of it at the very top, was designed to talk about the issues that are important to advertisers as we enter the upfront window. Shereen handled the diversity, equity, inclusion opportunities in our company. That was something that we had never done before. We had never dedicated a section during the upfront to diversity. That’s a statement to the marketplace that we want to be a leader in that area, and there is a growing demand for sponsorships of content that is either created by, viewed by or has a cast or theme around diversity, equity and inclusion. If there were one network right off the top of my head that stands out in that area more so than anything else in the industry will be TLC, in terms of presenting underrepresented groups in a positive light on many, many series on the network. I give Howard Lee a lot of credit. He’s been the brains behind TLC for a long time. Then, of course, OWN is another part of the story, as is the NBA, as is CNN. And we have U.S. Hispanic networks here too. What I was trying to do in the first 12 or 13 minutes, I was talking a lot about currency, advanced advertising and streaming. And not just streaming from an ad perspective.