WBD’s Jon Steinlauf on Holding an Upfront Without Talent—or David Zaslav—Onstage

  Rassegna Stampa, Social
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Max is almost here—how much of a role do you expect it to play across WBD’s conversations, and what did you want marketers to take away? 
What’s happening with Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max is you have three properties that are trying to work their way into the ad-lite business. And to get into the ad-lite business, you have to have subscribers. The deal at $9.99 that we’re going to put on the table for consumers is pretty compelling. It’s going to have just about everything we do as a company. It’s going to have not just lite advertising but very targeted advertising. You’re getting ads that are more targeted to the individual household than viewer. I was trying to say to the audience, “Put your consumer hats on, and think about what this product is at $9.99,” and into the future, direct-to-consumer and streaming will grow and share against traditional. We just wanted to have one product out there that we felt we would bring the entire portfolio together. There’s not a lot of transparency about streaming services and viewership and subscriber bases. It’s been a difficult area for the advertisers to really navigate. We wanted them to know that the $9.99 product was going to be the focus of a lot of our upfront conversations, and then we see it scaling in the next year or two. We see that over time the that consumers will come to AVOD because they’ll see the benefits of AVOD. It’s a challenge when you’re trying to take a brand like HBO into streaming with an AVOD layer. Because as soon as you say AVOD, ad-supported or even ad-lite, the first thing people think about, “Is it going to be like linear? Is it going to have lots and lots of ads and lots of interruptions and billboards and promos?” And it’s not what people would perceive ad-supported television networks to look like.

Warner Bros. Discovery announced ahead of time that it would only be executives on stage—how much of your presentation was impacted by the strike?
We had to go to video for Guy Fieri. The featured videos were replacing what would have been live on stage talent appearances. You saw Anderson Cooper. We would have had a live presentation from news talent. A couple of people said to me afterwards was Chris Licht [CEO of CNN] talking to Anderson Cooper in real time, “Was that a zoom or was that prerecorded?” That’s what you want to have happen. I told Chris this morning that’s exactly what we wanted. We wanted people to think that they were talking to each other live while they weren’t. But then you’re getting the impact. The closest you could get to what would have happened had there not been a strike is Anderson Cooper would have been up there with Chris. And you saw we did with the Inside the NBA team. It also was plausibly live to have Charles and Shaq and Ernie and Kenny doing what they did as a halftime show. That was one of the creative ideas is put the four of them together, record them a couple of days ago, have them do what they would have done on stage and make it a halftime show because they’re known as the halftime show. There would have been more Max talent. You saw two-plus minutes of And Just Like That. Maybe there could have been some live presence from that series. I can’t really say exactly what it would have been, but if you look at the video segments that we presented, some replaced what would have been live appearances.

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