Adweek’s upfront week postmortem chats continue to roll on. Thus far, we’ve spoken with NBCUniversal’s Mark Marshall, Fox’s Marianne Gambelli, TelevisaUnivision’s Donna Speciale, Disney’s Rita Ferro and Warner Bros. Discovery’s Jon Steinlauf. Now, Sean Downey, president of sales at Google and YouTube, is giving his take.
YouTube’s Brandcast event last Wednesday evening was one of the rare presentations that wasn’t affected by the Writers Guild of America Strike, which had many events going sans talent. With the platform relying on user-generated content, the company—held its event at Lincoln Center for the first time—showcased its creators, talked about its new NFL deal for YouTube TV and capped things off with a Doja Cat performance
Downey opened up about YouTube’s new offerings (including NFL Sunday Ticket, which will being airing this coming season), this year’s shift from Tuesday to Wednesday evening and why the platform—which shifted from NewFronts to upfront week in 2022—”belongs” alongside the week’s other presenters.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Adweek: Congratulations on making it through upfront week. As we ask all of the presenting ad sales leaders, what are you proudest of looking back on the event?
Downey: We’re excited that we had such a great event and such a great night with all of our customers, agencies and creators in the industry. We’re really proud that we put off a great show and that everyone got to see how great of an offering YouTube is. Everyone got into a great experience with us that night. And we’re going to tell the story about YouTube and how it helps brands, and we thought that was a great way to cap upfront week for us.
Heading into the presentation, what were your priorities?
We wanted to make sure people understood what we have to offer on YouTube and how it can help them build their business and grow their brands. Just make sure we presented the offering in the right way. We had a few things that we wanted to make sure that we got across to the market. One is that YouTube is where people go deep with the creators and the content that they love. We see that all the time. YouTube has everything people love in one place. From creator-driven content to primetime, it is always the best of both worlds and content at YouTube. It’s where the world comes to watch. And we got to demonstrate that when we have folks like Doja Cat or some of our creators. We really got to show them the full view of what YouTube is.