That’s exactly what we wanted. We wanted people to think that they were talking to each other live while they weren’t.
Jon Steinlauf, on making the prerecorded upfront videos from talent seem like livestreams
You did have talent appear in prerecorded segments. Was there a thought of shifting fully to virtual?
Never, absolutely not. Now that the dust is settled on these three days, people are talking about, “What did this week mean to the future of the upfront presentation week?” I’ve been working in this industry a long time, and I remember when I first started, there was ABC, CBS, NBC; that’s all we had. But each one took a day, and each one took a hotel space, and there were 400-500 people. That’s all they needed to talk to at that time. This industry was a lot smaller. This is a tradition that goes back to as early as 1970. Now, flash forward to 2023. We just finished our first week ever where we were impacted heavily by the strike. The shows are not what they used to be, but that’s what makes this week important is it’s a celebration of not just the traditional television network business but also the streaming services that are important to advertisers. That’s why Netflix wanted to jump in and do whatever they could do. Clients keep coming in, and in the last three days, Warner Bros. Discovery has had 100 client meetings. I would compare this to CES. I would compare this to Cannes. I would compare this to the Super Bowl as a point on the calendar where the ad community and the television and streaming community converge. We had an incredible amount of people there yesterday. This strike, the picketers and lack of talent did not keep people home. We can make a compelling show just with our seven or eight top executives staying within their lanes. Having Casey Bloys here yesterday, in my opinion, he’s probably the most successful creative executive in the television industry today. He’s never been in an upfront presentation before. He’s never presented on stage to advertisers. The reason why he was here is because Max is becoming a more important part of our company to ad sales.
Would you do it differently and consider having any sports or news talent on stage? I’m also curious about the decision to not have David Zaslav on stage. What was the thinking there?
David made the decision. I don’t think it was strike-related. I don’t think he chose not to go up on stage because of the strike. I think he chose not to go up on stage because he has done it for a long time. And he’s been CEO of Discovery since 2007. I think he wanted to cede that role to other executives in the company, as have a lot of his peers. When you think about CEOs of these companies, it’s really Brian Roberts; it’s Bob Iger; it’s David Zaslav. He looks at what the role is of the people that he considers to be his peers to him. If they’re letting their executives get the exposure, we had Bruce Campbell [CRO] on stage. You have to pick and choose who are the best executives that you want the audience to become more familiar with as time goes by. There were some articles about we could have used David on stage because he’s a celebrity CEO to compensate for the lack of star power up on that stage. But he was there. He’s not trying to say the ad business is not as important to us as it as it used to be.