And then the other part of the question?
If we go back next year, I would say the talent strategy is up for discussion. We just came out of a couple of meetings this morning where we’re trying to postmortem to say what works, what didn’t work out, the same kind of questions you’re asking. We’ll review it, but I don’t think this becomes the norm. I don’t think we just say let’s go without talent now that we did one without talent, and we got pretty good press about it, and we got good attendance. Is that the end of talent at the upfront presentation? I would say no.
This time last year, the merger had only just been completed before upfronts. Now, you had a full year to prepare. What were the major differences between the two years?
The biggest thing is we understand each other’s business. The way mergers work in our industry is there could be no communication between Warner[Media] ad sales and Discovery ad sales while the regulatory process was unfolding. It closed on April 11, so not only did we have to get ready for MSG in 2022—we had a limited amount of time to get ready for that—but we also had very limited amount of time to start sitting down and strategizing about, “What do you do with GroupM? What are you doing with OMG? What do you do with Publicis?” The bottom line is we did not have enough time last year to be able to put the right strategy together knowing what the histories were with each of these companies, and we did the best we could. We had some successes. We had some failures. We probably did not perform at the level of expectation. It was an earlier market last year, I don’t know when it’s going to move this year, but the market moved on the earlier side. We also had that working against us, and we had so much work to do to combine forces and to combine portfolios. This time around, we’ve been together for 13 months. We now work in the same building in almost every city. I’m sitting here right now in Hudson Yards. We have about 400 New York-based salespeople all together—same thing in LA, same thing in Chicago, same thing in Detroit, same thing in Atlanta. We’ve structured our teams in a way where we have people working—what we call quads. There’s a team that’s working on a set of networks, another set of networks, another set of networks and a lot of our standalone dedicated digital team. They know each other, work together, strategize together and come to the front together with full knowledge of everything happening at each agency’s portfolio.
You touched on this a little, but what can you tell us about early negotiations so far?
All I’ll say so far is the demand is positive for us in sports. I see a shift to sports. I’m seeing that the ratings are staying pretty firm in the sports world, and there’s a lot of immediate reach. We’re seeing the advertisers saying our sports budgets are going up, or we’re putting more brands into sports, or we’re putting more brands that are dual to even female-skewed in terms of its targeting into sports. I think that will be the genre of our business that’s going to be most successful in this upfront will be sports, and I think the side-by-side with sports will be streaming. Overall demand may not be up all in when you count everything, but with CNN, we’re heading into an election year, so we know that brings sponsors in different ways for coverage of the election cycle. The advertisers are paying attention to CNN, knowing that the ratings are about to take off as they always do in election cycles.
